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Baked Tomatoes

A baked tomato dish with butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Baked Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Open a can of tomatoes and pour them into a bowl.

  2. After an hour, season with sugar, salt, pepper, and butter cut into small bits rolled in flour.

  3. Distribute the butter evenly throughout the tomatoes.

  4. Cover with dry bread crumbs.

Bake and brown

  1. Bake in a covered pudding dish at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the cover and brown on the upper rack of the oven.

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

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the juicy base and supply the sharp, acidic flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the top brown as it melts.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the tomatoes.
Dry bread crumbs
Form a crisp topping that browns in the oven and absorbs some liquid.

The step that matters

Remove the cover and brown on the upper rack. The covered dish traps steam so the tomatoes cook through. Uncovering lets surface moisture evaporate, so the crumbs and butter can brown. Leaving the cover on too long leaves the top pale and soft.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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