Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Tomatoes

Stewed tomatoes are tomatoes simmered with butter, salt, pepper, and optional bread crumbs until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stewed Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Pour boiling water over fresh tomatoes and cover for 1 minute.

  2. Remove tomatoes from boiling water and plunge them into cold water.

  3. Peel the skins and remove the hard stem ends.

  4. Cut the tomatoes into pieces.

Stew and serve

  1. Stew the tomatoes in a granite‑ware or porcelain‑lined kettle for 30 minutes.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 teaspoon of salt, and ¼ teaspoon of pepper for each quart.

  3. Continue to stew until the desired thickness is reached.

  4. Optionally, add bread‑crumbs or cracker‑crumbs for thickening.

  5. Serve.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 flavor of the stewed dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the tomato's acidity.
Bread-crumbs or cracker-crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the stewed tomatoes.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatothe original
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, bread. 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 stewed tomatoes recipes

with Onion 3 See all 189 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes