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Baked Tomatoes

A baked tomato dish served with bread slices, milk, butter, sugar, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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

Prepare

  1. Drain the liquid from the can of tomatoes and reserve it for soup.

  2. Remove the crusts from the bread and cut the slices to fit the bottom of a greased pie dish.

  3. Fry the bread slices in dripping until light brown.

  4. Dip each slice in boiling salted milk.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the dipped slices in the dish.

  2. Pour the tomatoes over the bread.

  3. Season the tomatoes with pepper, salt, butter, and sugar.

  4. Sprinkle breadcrumbs generously on top.

  5. Cover the dish.

  6. Bake for 20 minutes.

  7. Uncover the dish and brown the top.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the base layer that soaks up the tomato juices and holds the dish together.
Tomatoes
Provide the moist, acidic sauce that softens the bread as it bakes.
Milk
Softens the fried bread slices and adds a soft, custardy richness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the top brown.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping over the moist layers below.

The step that matters

Brown the top after covering. The dish is covered for most of the bake, which traps steam and keeps the surface moist. Uncovering it at the end lets moisture escape so the breadcrumbs can dry and brown.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatothe original
  4. Sweet potatofits about as well

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