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Tomato Pie

A baked pie with tomatoes, onions, eggs, vermicelli, and a buttered crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and wheat work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 468 recipes. Both carry 1-nonanal, which smells fatty, waxy. The science ↓

Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Dice the tomatoes and onions.

  2. Parboil the diced tomatoes and onions in 1 pint of water with butter and seasoning.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a pie dish.

  4. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and add them to the dish along with the broken vermicelli.

Make the crust and bake

  1. Make a dough with the flour, 3 oz butter, and a little cold water.

  2. Cover the pie with the crust and bake for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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. Tomato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  2. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + wheattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Release juice and body into the filling as they soften.
Onions
Add aroma and mild sweetness as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to both the filling and the crust.
Vermicelli
Adds body to the filling and soaks up some of the released juices.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firmness and richness to the filling.
Fine wheat flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the crust its structure.

The step that matters

Making the crust dough. Using only a little cold water and handling the dough minimally keeps the crust tender. Too much water or overworking develops gluten, which toughens the crust.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, egg, wheat, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, egg, wheat, flour. 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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