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Gkeen Tomato Pickles

Pickled green tomatoes with onions, mustard, spices, sugar, and vinegar, boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Gkeen Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sprinkle sliced green tomatoes with salt and let them stand overnight.

Layer and cook

  1. Layer the sliced onions with the tomatoes.

  2. Add the white mustard seed, ground mustard, cloves, allspice, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, turmeric, salt, and brown sugar in layers.

  3. Cover with vinegar and boil for two hours.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 pickle and, once salted, release moisture that softens their texture.
Onions
Add sweetness and body, layering flavor through the pickle as they cook.
White mustard seed
Contributes pungent, sharp flavor that mellows during long simmering in vinegar.
Brown sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness and deepens the color.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mixture, providing the sharp tang that preserves and flavors the pickle.

The step that matters

Cover with vinegar and boil for two hours. Long boiling in vinegar softens the tomatoes and onions and blends the spices into the liquid. Too short a boil leaves the vegetables firm and the spice flavor raw.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, mustard, clove, allspice, ginger, pepper, cinnamon. 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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