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Sliced Tomatoes

Sliced tomatoes served as a relish, optionally seasoned with salt, vinegar, sugar, or oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sliced Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch a few tomatoes at a time in boiling water.

  2. Peel and slice the tomatoes.

  3. Set them in a cool place or place a piece of ice on them.

Serve

  1. Serve as a relish for dinner with coarse sea salt.

  2. Optionally, add vinegar and sugar or a French dressing of oil and vinegar.

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. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Tomato + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh tomatoes
Provide the main body, juice and flavour of the relish.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the tomato slices and draws out a little of their juice.

The step that matters

Blanch a few tomatoes at a time in boiling water.. Blanching briefly heats the skin so it loosens and peels off easily. Blanching too many tomatoes at once drops the water temperature, so the skins may not loosen and the tomatoes may cook unevenly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, 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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