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Fried Tomatoes

Fried tomatoes coated in flour, pan‑fried, topped with a thickened milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fried Tomatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice the tomatoes thickly and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Roll the slices in flour.

Fry

  1. Heat equal parts of butter and lard in a skillet.

  2. Fry the floured tomato slices until golden brown.

  3. Keep the fried tomatoes hot in a serving dish.

Make the cream sauce and serve

  1. In the same skillet, mix a little flour and butter, then stir in the milk.

  2. Boil the mixture until thickened and pour over the fried tomatoes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tomato + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and juicy filling that the crisp coating surrounds.
All-purpose flour
Forms a light coating that browns in the fat and helps thicken the milk sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor for frying and for the sauce base.
Lard
Gives a high-heat frying fat that browns the coating evenly.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, which thickens when boiled with the flour and butter.

The step that matters

Boil the milk sauce until thickened. Flour thickens milk only when it reaches a boil and the starch swells, so stopping early leaves a thin sauce that does not cling to the tomatoes.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, butter, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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