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Salad

Stuffed Tomato Salad

A chilled salad of tomatoes filled with cucumber, peas, pickles, capers, chicken, mayonnaise, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Peel the tomatoes and remove a thin slice from the top of each.

  2. Take out the seeds and pulp, sprinkle the inside with salt, and let them stand upside down for 30 minutes.

Make the filling

  1. Drain the seeds and pulp, then mix with the diced cucumber, cold peas, chopped pickles, and capers.

  2. Drain the mixture as dry as possible, then add the diced chicken and mix with mayonnaise.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the tomatoes with the mixture, sprinkle with parsley, and place each on a lettuce leaf.

  2. Serve very cold.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  3. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 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
Hollow shells that hold the filling and give the salad its fresh, juicy body.
Mayonnaise
Binds the chicken and vegetables into a creamy, moist filling.
Cold chicken
Provides the protein and substance of the filling.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the mayonnaise.
Pickles
Add tangy acidity and a crisp bite to the filling.

The step that matters

Drain the seeds, pulp and mixture thoroughly. Excess liquid from tomato pulp and cucumber dilutes the mayonnaise and makes the filling watery. Draining well keeps the filling thick and stable so it holds its shape inside the tomatoes.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cucumber, capers, chicken, parsley, lettuce):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cucumber, capers, chicken, parsley, lettuce. 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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