Name: Sweet Tomato Pickles
Ingredients: 1 peck green tomatoes, sliced; 1 quart vinegar; 3 pounds sugar; 3 tablespoons cinnamon; 1 tablespoon cloves; 1 tablespoon allspice; 2 tablespoons whole mustard seed; coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Sweet Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Boil sliced green tomatoes in water and vinegar with a little coarse sea salt until easily pierced with a fork.
Drain the tomatoes through a sieve.
Scald together 1 quart of vinegar, 3 pounds of sugar, 3 tablespoons of cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of cloves, and 1 tablespoon of allspice.
Put the spices into a bag and boil in the vinegar.
In a jar, layer the sliced tomatoes and thinly sliced onions alternately until all are placed.
Pour the boiling spiced vinegar over the layers and add 2 tablespoons of whole mustard seed.
Cover lightly.

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.

Cinnamon + clovetop 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).
Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,581 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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, sugar, cinnamon, clove, allspice, mustard):

Horseradishfits better
Shallotfits better
Radishfits better
Tomatothe original

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