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Stuffed Tomatoes

A dish of tomatoes filled with a mixture of hard‑boiled eggs, green pepper, celery, caviar, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Chill the tomatoes thoroughly.

  2. Slice the top off each tomato and remove the seeds and some pulp.

Make the filling

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs, green pepper, and celery finely.

  2. Mix the chopped ingredients with the caviar and moisten with Mayonnaise Dressing.

Fill and serve

  1. Refill the tomatoes with the mixture.

  2. Arrange the stuffed tomatoes on lettuce leaves and cover with more 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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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 filling and gives a cool, juicy base.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and a firm, creamy texture to the filling.
Caviar
Adds salty, briny flavor and a distinctive texture to the filling.
Mayonnaise dressing
Moistens the filling and binds the chopped ingredients together with richness.

The step that matters

Remove the seeds and some pulp. Scooping out too little leaves the tomato watery and the filling loose, while scooping too much can crack the shell. Removing seeds and pulp makes room for the filling and limits excess liquid leaking into it.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, celery, caviar, 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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