Name: Stewed Green Tomatoes
Ingredients: good-sized green tomatoes; butter; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Tomato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,918 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Stewed Green Tomatoes

Ingredients

good-sized green tomatoes
butter
coarse sea salt

Directions

Prepare

Wash the green tomatoes and cut them into slices half an inch thick.
Melt a generous lump of butter in a skillet over medium heat.

Cook and serve

Add the tomato slices to the skillet and sprinkle with salt.
Cook until the tomatoes are tender.
Serve hot with sugar and vinegar, or plain as preferred.

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.

Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,918 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 and tart flavor that the dish is built around.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping the tomato slices brown lightly in the skillet.

“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.