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Green Tomato Sauce

A preserved sauce made from sliced green tomatoes, 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Sprinkle the sliced green tomatoes with coarse sea salt and let them drain for 24 hours.

  2. In the morning, press out all the water from the tomatoes.

Cook the sauce

  1. In a preserving kettle, layer the tomatoes with the sliced onions and the mixture of mustard, mustard seeds, cloves, black pepper, allspice, and ginger.

  2. Cover the mixture with vinegar and boil very slowly until the tomatoes look clear.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  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
Form the bulk of the sauce and, once salted and pressed, give a firm texture to the finished sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the sliced tomatoes, firming them and concentrating their flavour before cooking.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and body that softens into the sauce during slow cooking.
Mustard seeds
Contribute pungent, sharp flavour that mellows during long simmering.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the sauce its tang and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boil very slowly until the tomatoes look clear. Simmering gently lets the tomato pieces soften and turn translucent while the vinegar and spices blend evenly. Boiling too hard can break the tomatoes down unevenly and scorch the bottom of the kettle.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, mustard, clove, pepper, allspice, ginger, vinegar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, mustard, clove, pepper, allspice, ginger, vinegar. 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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