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Fried Tomatoes

Fried tomatoes with a butter‑flour‑milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fried Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice the tomatoes as you would for broiling.

  2. Dredge the tomato slices in flour.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry the slices in butter until light brown.

  2. Place the fried tomatoes in a hot chafing dish.

  3. In the same pan, add more butter and an equal amount of flour. Stir well and add milk or cream, seasoning to taste.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the tomatoes and serve immediately.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tomato + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and juicy filling of the dish.
All-purpose flour
Coats the slices and thickens the butter and milk into a sauce.
Butter
Fries the tomato slices to light brown and adds richness to the sauce.
Milk or cream
Liquid that turns the flour and butter mixture into a creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter in the pan. Flour must be stirred into melted butter and cooked briefly before the liquid goes in. Stirring it well keeps the sauce smooth instead of lumpy, and the milk or cream then thickens as it heats.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, pepper. 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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