Skip to main content
Salad

Stuffed Tomato Salad

A salad of tomatoes filled with cucumber, cabbage, celery, and walnuts, set in lemon Jello.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Dissolve the lemon Jello in boiling water.

  2. Peel each tomato, remove the core, and fill with chopped cucumbers, cabbage, celery, and walnut meats.

  3. Place the filled tomatoes upside down in molds and pour the cooled Jello over them.

Serve

  1. Serve on a bed of lettuce with mayonnaise or your choice of salad dressing.

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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 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

Lemon jello
Gelatin sets the liquid into a firm mold that holds the tomato in shape.
Tomato
Serves as the hollow shell that holds the filling and gives the salad its body.
Walnut meats
Add crunch and a contrast in texture to the soft filling.
Mayonnaise or salad dressing
Adds fat and richness to balance the tart gelatin and vegetables.

The step that matters

Pour the cooled Jello over the filled tomatoes. If the Jello is still hot, it can soften or break down the tomato and filling, and if it is too cold or too thick it may not flow around the filling evenly, leaving gaps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cucumber, cabbage, celery, walnut, meat, lettuce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cucumber, cabbage, celery, walnut, meat, lettuce. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipes