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Tomato Salad

A salad of boiled tongue, chow chow, pickles, eggs, and seasonings stuffed into tomatoes and served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Tomato Salad

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Cut the tops off the tomatoes.

  2. Remove the insides and stuff them with the salad mixture of tongue, chow chow, pickles, eggs, salt, and pepper.

Chill and serve

  1. Set the stuffed tomatoes on ice before serving.

  2. When ready to serve, add a teaspoon of mayonnaise on top of each tomato and place them on lettuce leaves.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Serve as the hollow shell that holds the salad filling.
Boiled tongue
Supplies the meaty, savory body of the salad filling.
Hard boiled eggs
Add firm, creamy texture and body to the filling.
Chow chow
Adds tangy, acidic, sweet-sour flavor that brightens the filling.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and richness to the finished top layer.

The step that matters

Set the stuffed tomatoes on ice before serving. Tomatoes are mostly water and mayonnaise and egg are fats and proteins that soften or separate when warm. Keeping the stuffed tomatoes cold holds their shape, keeps the filling firm, and slows spoilage of the meat and eggs.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, egg, pepper, lettuce):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, egg, pepper, lettuce. 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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