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Green Tomato Pickle

A pickled green tomato dish with onions, mustard, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice the green tomatoes and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let them stand overnight.

  3. Soak the tomatoes until the afternoon.

Make the pickle

  1. Slice the onions.

  2. Combine the onions with mustard, cloves, allspice, black pepper, celery seed, and sugar in a pot.

  3. Cover the mixture with vinegar.

  4. Boil until tender.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Provide the main body of the pickle, becoming tender as they cook in the vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the tomatoes, firming them and helping them keep their texture.
Vinegar
Supplies the acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it its sharp flavor.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth that mellows during the long boil.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and rounds out the sweet-sour flavor.

The step that matters

Drawing out water from the tomatoes. Salting and soaking the tomatoes removes excess water through osmosis. If they are not drained well, the pickle will be watery and the vinegar will be diluted, so the texture and flavor suffer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, mustard, clove, allspice, pepper, celery, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, mustard, clove, allspice, pepper, celery, sugar. 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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