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Tohato Toast

A toast topped with stewed tomatoes, butter, sugar, and cream.

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

Tohato Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the bread until quite brown.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the tomatoes with salt, pepper, butter, and sugar.

  2. Add the cream and scald it only.

Serve

  1. Pour the tomato mixture over the toast.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body, moisture, and acidity of the topping once stewed.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded flavor to the stewed tomatoes.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, creamier texture to the tomato mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tomatoes' acidity.
Bread
Forms the base, and toasting it gives a firm, crisp surface that holds the topping.

The step that matters

Scald the cream only. Heat the cream until it steams at the edges without boiling. Tomatoes are acidic, and overheated dairy is more likely to curdle or separate when combined with them, so the cream should be just hot, not boiling.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, sugar, cream, 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.

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