Name: Tomato Baskets
Ingredients: medium round tomatoes; lettuce; mayonnaise; ribbon; greens for serving

Why it works: Tomato and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,655 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Baskets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Cut the tops off the tomatoes and scoop out the insides to create baskets.

Fill and serve

Fill each basket with cubes of raw tomato and small pieces of lettuce.
Top each filled basket with 1 teaspoon of mayonnaise.
Tie the handles of the baskets with a ribbon.
Serve the baskets on a bed of greens.

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.

Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Adds crisp, fresh texture and a mild, leafy flavour to the filling.
Mayonnaise: Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a creamy finish.

“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.