Name: Tomato Pie
Ingredients: tomatoes; 1 tablespoon chopped onion; salt; pepper; 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind; ½ cup weak stock or water; 1 tablespoon fine bread crumbs; small piece of butter; macaroni, boiled and cut into 1-inch pieces

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the tomatoes and roughly cut them up in a basin.
Mix in the chopped onion, salt, pepper, grated lemon rind, stock or water, bread crumbs, and butter.
Add the boiled macaroni to the tomato mixture.

Bake

Thoroughly butter a baking dish, pour in the pie mixture, and cook for 20 minutes.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes: Provide the main body and moisture of the pie filling.
Macaroni: Adds starch and bulk, soaking up tomato juices as the pie bakes.
Bread crumbs: Absorb liquid and help thicken the tomato mixture slightly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, lemon, bread, butter):

Capsicumfits better
Asparagusfits better
Spinachfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, lemon, bread, butter. 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.