Name: Stuffed Tomatoes
Ingredients: small firm tomatoes; celery; apples; bananas; hard boiled eggs; salad dressing; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Apple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 435 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Select one small, firm tomato for each person.
Carefully remove the top and scoop out the pulp.
Prepare equal portions of celery, apples, bananas, and hard boiled eggs.
Mix the prepared ingredients with salad dressing.
Refill the tomato shells with the mixture.
Serve on lettuce leaves.

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.

Apple + bananatop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together435 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,377 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Banana + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together198 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, celery, apple, egg, lettuce):

Avocadofits better
Cherryfits better
Plumfits better
Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, celery, apple, egg, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.