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Sunshine Toast

A toast made with tomato puree, peanut butter, and flour, served on moistened zwieback slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and peanut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 315 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sunshine Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Select ripe yellow tomatoes and heat them.

  2. Sift the tomatoes through a colander to remove skins and seeds.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine 2 cups of sifted tomato, 1 tablespoon of white flour, and 1 heaping teaspoon of peanut butter dissolved in a little water. Add salt to taste.

Serve on toast

  1. Pour the mixture while hot over slices of zwieback that have been moistened with hot water.

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. Tomato + peanuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together315 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + peanuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 yellow tomatoes
Provides the main body, moisture and mild acidity of the sauce.
White flour
Thickens the tomato mixture as it heats, giving it body.
Peanut butter
Adds fat and nutty richness that softens the tomato's sharpness.

The step that matters

Combine the flour with the tomato. Flour clumps if dropped into hot liquid unmixed. Mixing it first with the peanut butter and a little water lets it disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly rather than lumpily.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, peanut, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, peanut, 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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