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Stewed Tomatoes

A tomato stew made with peeled tomatoes, sugar, pepper, salt, bread crumbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Stewed Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Loosen the skins of the tomatoes with hot water, then peel and slice them.

  2. Stew the tomatoes until they break into pieces.

  3. Pulp the tomatoes through a coarse sieve, rubbing out all that will pass.

Make the stewed tomatoes

  1. Return the pulp to the fire with a little sugar, pepper, and coarse sea salt, and boil briskly for fifteen minutes.

  2. Stir in enough fine bread crumbs to make a thick batter, then add a large spoonful of butter. Stew for five minutes while stirring well.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture into the center of a flat dish and arrange the chops around it.

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. 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. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh tomatoes
Provide the main body and flavour of the dish once stewed and pulped.
Fine bread crumbs
Thicken the pulp into a batter as they absorb liquid and swell.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the finished mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Stirring in the bread crumbs. Crumbs must be added gradually and stirred well so they hydrate evenly; adding too many at once makes lumps or an overly stiff batter, while too few leaves the mixture thin.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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