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Tomatoes with Cream Sauce

Sliced tomatoes served with a creamy sauce made from flour, butter, milk or cream, seasoned with salt, pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Tomatoes with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Cut the tomatoes into thick slices without peeling them.

  2. Sprinkle salt, pepper, and sugar on one side.

  3. Dredge the seasoned side with flour.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry the tomatoes in hot butter until golden.

  2. Transfer to a hot platter.

  3. In the same pan, add milk or cream and stir in flour.

  4. Season the sauce and pour it over the tomatoes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and juicy filling of the dish.
All-purpose flour
Coats the tomatoes for browning and thickens the milk or cream into a sauce.
Butter
Fries the tomatoes to a golden color and adds richness.
Milk or cream
Forms the base of the sauce, adding richness and body.

The step that matters

Frying the floured tomatoes in hot butter until golden. Flour browns well only in hot fat, and the coating forms a crust that holds up to the sauce. Cooking in butter that is too cool lets the tomatoes soak up fat and stew, leaving them soggy instead of golden.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sugar, flour, butter, milk):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, flour, butter, milk. 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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