Name: Bean and Tomato Soup
Ingredients: 1 quart ripe tomatoes; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 1 teaspoon sugar; leftover bean soup; fried bread, diced

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean and Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

Cut up the tomatoes and season with pepper, salt, and sugar.
Stew the tomatoes until they break into pieces.
Rub the mixture through a colander.
Add the leftover bean soup.
Heat together until almost boiling.

Serve

Pour the soup over the diced fried bread in a tureen.

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.

Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,013 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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

Ripe tomatoes: Provide the main body and tangy flavour of the soup once stewed and strained.
Sugar: Balances the acidity of the tomatoes, rounding out their flavour.
Leftover bean soup: Adds body and savoury bean flavour to the tomato base.
Fried bread: Adds crisp texture and absorbs the soup when poured over it in the tureen.