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Sliced Green Tomato Pickles

Pickled sliced green tomatoes and onions with vinegar, salt, sugar, mustard, cloves, cinnamon, and green peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sliced Green Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the green tomatoes and onions thinly.

  2. Sprinkle with 1 cup of coarse sea salt and let stand overnight.

  3. Drain the mixture the next morning.

Cook the vegetables

  1. Boil the tomatoes and onions in 1 quart of vinegar and 2 quarts of water for 5 minutes.

  2. Drain through a colander.

Finish the pickles

  1. In a large pot, combine 4 quarts of vinegar, 2 pounds of brown sugar, ½ pound of ground mustard, 2 tablespoons of cloves, 2 tablespoons of cinnamon, and 6 chopped green peppers.

  2. Pour the mixture over the tomatoes and onions and boil for 15 minutes.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and, once salted and cooked, give it a firm, tender texture.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and body that softens as the pickle cooks.
Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve it.
Brown sugar
Balances the vinegar with sweetness and helps form a thick, syrupy liquid.
Ground mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour that rounds out the sweet and sour notes.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aroma to the spiced pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Salt and drain the vegetables overnight. Salt draws water out of the tomatoes and onions by osmosis, firming them. Draining well removes the released liquid so the pickling mixture stays concentrated and does not turn watery.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, vinegar, sugar, mustard, clove, cinnamon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, vinegar, sugar, mustard, clove, cinnamon, pepper. 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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