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Salad

Stuffed Tomato Salad

A salad of hollowed tomatoes filled with a celery, walnut, and mayonnaise mixture, served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Plunge tomatoes into boiling water to peel them.

  2. Remove a thin slice from the stem end of each tomato.

  3. Remove seeds and some pulp, sprinkle inside with salt, and invert to let stand for 30 minutes.

Fill and serve

  1. Mix chopped celery and walnuts with mayonnaise.

  2. Fill the tomatoes with the mixture.

  3. Serve on lettuce leaves and garnish with additional dressing, shrimp, or pimola.

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

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

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 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

Tomatoes
Serve as the hollow shell that holds the filling.
Mayonnaise
Binds the celery and walnuts and adds moisture and richness to the filling.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty texture against the soft filling.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild crunch to the filling.

The step that matters

Letting the salted tomatoes stand. Salt draws water out of the tomato flesh through osmosis. Standing upside down for 30 minutes lets excess juice drain, so the filling stays firm and does not make the shells soggy or watery.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, celery, lettuce, shrimp. 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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