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Tomatoes Stuffed with Chestnuts

Tomatoes are hollowed, filled with a chestnut and olive oil mixture, topped with mayonnaise, and served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tomatoes Stuffed with Chestnuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut a slice from the stem end of each tomato and scoop out the insides with a teaspoon.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix the scooped tomato insides with olive oil, lemon juice, sugar, grated onion, salt, pepper, and grated chestnuts.

  2. Stuff the mixture back into the tomato hulls.

Serve

  1. Top with mayonnaise and serve on a lettuce leaf.

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. Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tomato + olivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  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

Chestnuts
Provide the bulk and starchy, mildly sweet body of the filling.
Olive oil
Adds fat and moisture, carrying flavour through the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the tomato and balances the sweetness.
White onion
Adds sharp aromatic flavour to the filling once grated.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, olive, lemon, sugar, pepper, chestnut, lettuce):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, olive, lemon, sugar, pepper, chestnut, 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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