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Dessert

Tomato with Gelatine

A chilled gelatin dessert made from stewed tomatoes, sweetened and flavored with salt, pepper, sugar, lemon juice, and set in molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato with Gelatine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water until soft.

Make the tomato liquid

  1. Drain the juice from the tomatoes and heat it in a saucepan.

  2. Add salt, pepper, and sugar to the tomato juice to taste.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, then remove from heat and skim off any foam.

  4. Add the softened gelatine and lemon juice to the hot tomato juice and stir until dissolved.

  5. Strain the mixture and let it cool until it thickens slightly.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into prepared molds and refrigerate until set.

  2. Serve chilled with lettuce and mayonnaise dressing.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Gelatine
Sets the tomato liquid into a firm, sliceable gel as it chills.
Tomatoes
Provide the main flavour and body of the tomato liquid.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine in hot liquid. Gelatine must be fully dissolved in hot, not boiling, liquid and then cooled slightly before setting. Incompletely dissolved gelatine leaves grainy specks, and overheating can weaken its ability to set firmly.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, lemon. 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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