Skip to main content
Dessert

Green Tomato Pie

A pie made with sliced green tomatoes, sugar, butter, spices, and lemon rind, baked until the juice thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the green tomatoes very thin.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a pie dish, layer the sliced tomatoes, followed by sugar, butter, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a thick sprinkle of flour.

  2. Repeat with another layer of tomatoes, sugar, and spices.

  3. Flavor with grated lemon rind.

  4. Bake until the juice thickens.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 filling, with their tart flavor and juice that thickens during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the green tomatoes.
Flour
Sprinkled between layers to thicken the juices as the pie bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying the spice flavors through the filling.

The step that matters

Bake until the juice thickens. Flour thickens juices only when they reach a bubbling heat, so the filling needs to bake long enough for the starch to set. Underbaking leaves a runny filling that soaks the crust.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, lemon):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes