Name: Green Tomato Pickle
Ingredients: green tomatoes; coarse sea salt; vinegar; cloves; allspice; stick cinnamon

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 ↓

Green Tomato Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Puncture the tomatoes with a fork and place them on a dish. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let them sit for 2-3 days.
Rinse the tomatoes in clear water to remove the salt.
In a preserving kettle, cover the tomatoes with scalding hot water and keep them hot for 1 hour.
Remove the tomatoes and place them in jars.
Boil vinegar with cloves, allspice, and stick cinnamon.
Once the vinegar mixture is cool, pour enough over the tomatoes to cover them.

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.

Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,874 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Tomato + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,348 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,474 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove, allspice, cinnamon):

Mustardfits better
Horseradishfits better
Shallotfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove, allspice, cinnamon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.