Name: Green Tomato Pickle
Ingredients: green tomatoes, sliced; coarse sea salt; chopped onion; sugar; mustard seed; scraped horseradish; bits of ginger; strong cider vinegar

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Layer sliced green tomatoes in a jar.
Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt over the tomatoes.
Add a layer of chopped onion.
Sprinkle sugar, mustard seed, scraped horseradish, and bits of ginger on top.
Repeat layers until the jar is filled.
Cover the contents with strong cider vinegar.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,259 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).
Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,784 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 (onion, sugar, mustard, horseradish, ginger, cider, vinegar):

Shallotfits better
Radishfits better
Broccolifits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, sugar, mustard, horseradish, ginger, cider, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.