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Tomatoes on Toast

Tomatoes on Toast is a simple dish of sliced tomatoes sautéed in butter and served over toasted bread with a creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tomatoes on Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Skin the tomatoes and slice them.

  2. Dredge the slices with flour, salt, and pepper.

Fry and assemble

  1. Fry the tomatoes slowly in hot butter for about 10 minutes.

  2. Carefully lift them out with a cake-turner and place on toasted bread.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. In the pan, add butter, flour, and milk or cream to the gravy.

  2. Cook for a few minutes, season lightly, and pour over the tomatoes and toast.

  3. Serve immediately.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

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

  4. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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, slightly acidic flavour of the dish.
Flour
Coats the tomatoes and thickens the butter and milk into a gravy.
Butter
Fat for frying that adds richness and browning to the tomatoes and gravy.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and body to the gravy, making it smooth and creamy.

The step that matters

Fry the tomatoes slowly in hot butter. Frying slowly lets the tomato slices cook through and brown gently without burning the butter or the flour coating. Careful heat control also keeps the slices intact when they are lifted out.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, butter, bread, 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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