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Tomato Tarbooches

Bread slices topped with stewed tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,013 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Tarbooches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut out 10 small circles from the bread using a cutter with slanting sides.

Make the tomato topping

  1. In a saucepan, combine the can of tomatoes with a pinch of baking soda.

  2. Stew the tomatoes until heated through.

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. Bread + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Stale bread holds its shape and absorbs less moisture, so the toasts stay firm under the topping.
Tomatoes
Provide moisture, acidity and the main flavor of the topping.
Baking soda
Neutralizes some of the tomatoes' acid, which softens them and changes their color and taste.

The step that matters

Adding the baking soda to the tomatoes. Baking soda reacts with the tomatoes' acid and foams, so the pan needs room. Too much soda leaves a soapy, flat taste, so use only a pinch.

“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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