Skip to main content
Main

Green Tomato Pickles

Pickled green tomatoes with onions, peppers, and spices, simmered in vinegar and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the onions, peppers, and tomatoes together in layers, sprinkling salt between each layer.

  2. Let stand overnight.

  3. The next day, rinse thoroughly in several waters.

Cook and store

  1. When well rinsed, add brown sugar, vinegar, mustard seed, whole cloves, broken ginger root, and broken cinnamon.

  2. Boil all together for about 15 minutes or until clear.

  3. Put in a 2-gallon stone jar.

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 + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 soften as they cook in the spiced vinegar.
Onions
Add sharpness and body that mellow during the long sweet-sour cook.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and sharpens the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the sliced vegetables so they become crisp and less watery.
Mustard seed
Contributes pungent, slightly bitter flavor that deepens during cooking.

The step that matters

Rinsing after the overnight salting. Salt draws out water and flavor from the vegetables. Rinsing thoroughly removes surface salt so the pickle is not overly salty once the sugar and vinegar are added.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, sugar, vinegar, mustard, clove, ginger. 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.

More green tomato pickles recipes

Sweet 20 See all 141 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes