Name: Pickled Plum-tomatoes
Ingredients: plum tomatoes; 1 teaspoon whole cloves; 1 teaspoon peppercorns; 1 teaspoon allspice; 2 teaspoons small pieces of stick cinnamon; boiling hot vinegar

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Pickled Plum-tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Fill a glass fruit jar with the tomatoes.
Add 1 teaspoon each of whole cloves, peppercorns, and allspice, and 2 teaspoons of small pieces of stick cinnamon.
Fill the jar with boiling hot vinegar and seal.
Omit spices if you prefer them plain.

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.

Clove + cinnamontop 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).
Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,536 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together513 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).
Plum + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,480 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Plum tomatoes: Form the main body of the pickle and absorb the flavour of the vinegar and spices.
Vinegar: Provides the acidity that preserves the tomatoes and gives the pickle its sharp taste.
Whole cloves: Add warm, aromatic spice flavour that infuses into the tomatoes.
Stick cinnamon: Adds sweet, woody aroma as its flavour seeps into the vinegar and fruit.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, clove, allspice, cinnamon, vinegar):

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Shallotfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, clove, allspice, cinnamon, vinegar. 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.