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Dessert

Southern Tomato Pie

A pie made with green tomatoes, vinegar, butter, sugar, and nutmeg or cinnamon, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and tomato work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 879 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Southern Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Peel and slice the green tomatoes.

  3. In a bowl, combine the tomatoes with vinegar, butter, sugar, and nutmeg or cinnamon.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into one pie crust and cover with the second crust.

  2. Bake slowly until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbly.

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. Nutmeg + tomatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together879 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Vinegar + tomatotop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 flavour of the filling.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and offsets the tartness of the tomatoes and vinegar.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the filling.
Pie crusts
Enclose the filling and brown during baking to form the structure.

The step that matters

Bake slowly until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbly. A low oven lets the filling heat through and thicken gradually while the crust browns, so the pie is cooked inside without burning on top.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, butter, sugar, nutmeg):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, butter, sugar, nutmeg. 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.

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