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Sliced Tomato Pickles

Pickled sliced green tomatoes with spices, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sliced Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Mix sliced green tomatoes with coarse sea salt and let stand for 12 hours, then drain.

  2. Place tomatoes in a large porcelain kettle or new tin pan.

Cook

  1. Add brown sugar, ground mustard, whole cloves, allspice, stick cinnamon, whole green pepper, and onions.

  2. Cover with best cider vinegar and set on the stove.

  3. Once the vinegar begins to warm, gently turn the slices until they turn yellow, being careful not to break them.

  4. When done, pack into jars and seal tightly.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften as they cook in the vinegar syrup.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cider vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the tomatoes and gives the pickle its tang.
Onions
Add savoury flavour and aroma that blends into the spiced vinegar.
Ground mustard
Adds pungent, sharp flavour that complements the sweet and sour base.

The step that matters

Gently turning the slices as they warm. Tomato slices are fragile and break down easily when heated. Turning them gently keeps them whole, while heating the vinegar slowly lets the slices soften evenly rather than collapsing into mush.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sugar, mustard, clove, allspice, cinnamon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, mustard, clove, allspice, cinnamon, pepper. 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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