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Tomato Savoury

A tomato-based savory with ham, eggs, cheese, and herbs served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Tomato Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald the tomatoes, remove the skin, place them in a buttered sauté pan, and bake until tender.

  2. Rub the baked tomatoes through a wire sieve.

Make the savory

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and fry the chopped shallots.

  2. Add the chopped ham, parsley, tomato mash, bread crumbs, and grated cheese, and stir well over medium heat.

  3. Season with salt, white pepper, and a dust of cayenne.

  4. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture, stirring until set.

Serve

  1. Serve on hot buttered toast, sprinkled with grated Parmesan cheese.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Bread + cheesetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  4. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and moisture of the savory once baked and sieved into a mash.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the mixture into a soft, spoonable custard-like texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid from the tomato mash, thickening the mixture and giving it body.
Grated cheese
Melts into the warm mixture, adding richness and savory flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor when used to fry the shallots.

The step that matters

Stirring the eggs until set. Eggs thicken as their proteins coagulate with heat. Adding them to a mixture that is too hot or left too long can scramble them into curds, so stir gently over heat only until the mixture thickens.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, shallot, ham, parsley, bread, cheese, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, shallot, ham, parsley, bread, cheese, egg. 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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