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Green Tomato Sweet Pickle

Pickled green tomatoes sweetened with brown sugar and seasoned with cloves, allspice, ginger, cinnamon, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Green Tomato Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sprinkle sliced green tomatoes with salt and let stand overnight.

Cook and pickle

  1. Drain the tomatoes in the morning and boil them in water and vinegar for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain the tomatoes in a colander and simmer them in a mixture of brown sugar, cider vinegar, and spices for 15 minutes.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 of the pickle, which softens during salting and simmering.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the sliced tomatoes, firming them and seasoning them before pickling.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the tomatoes and gives the pickle its tangy flavor.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and depth, balancing the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Draining after salting. Salt draws out a lot of liquid overnight; rinsing or draining thoroughly before simmering keeps the pickling liquid from being diluted, so the tomatoes absorb the sweet-sour syrup instead of watering it down.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice, ginger, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice, ginger, cinnamon. 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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