Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Tomatoes

A dish of hollowed tomatoes filled with cucumber, walnuts, green pepper, and tomato flesh, topped with mayonnaise and walnut halves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Mix cucumber, walnuts, green pepper, and season to taste.

  2. Peel and cut the tops off the tomatoes, removing some flesh to create space.

  3. Add the removed tomato flesh to the chopped mixture.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the hollowed tomatoes with the mixture.

  2. Top each tomato with a teaspoon of mayonnaise and a walnut half.

  3. Serve on a lettuce leaf or a nest of celery straws.

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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, nutty contrast to the soft filling.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the filling and softening its flavour.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, pepper, tomato, lettuce):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, tomato, lettuce. 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.

More stuffed tomatoes recipes

You might also like