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Tomato Relish

A tomato relish made with tomatoes, salt, butter, and bread, served by soaking toasted bread in the tomato gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tomato Relish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Open the tin of tomatoes.

  2. Pour a fourth of the contents into a frying pan.

Make the relish

  1. Add a liberal quantity of coarse sea salt and some butter.

  2. Fry and boil the mixture until heated through.

Serve

  1. Toast a slice of bread for each person.

  2. Let the toasted bread soak in the gravy from the frying pan.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 acidity of the relish, cooking down into a sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the tomato mixture taste rounder and smoother.
Bread
Soaks up the warm tomato gravy, giving a soft, moist base for the relish.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatothe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread. 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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