Name: To Pickle Tomatoes
Ingredients: ripe tomatoes; garlic; mustard seed; horseradish; spices of your choice; fine salt; cider vinegar

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Pickle Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Gather ripe tomatoes and place them in layers in a jar.
Add garlic, mustard seed, horseradish, and your chosen spices between the layers.
Sprinkle fine salt proportionally as you fill the jar.
Once full, pour cold cider vinegar over the tomatoes until they are completely covered.
Seal the jar tightly with a cork.

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.

Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,832 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,076 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Garlic + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together719 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,053 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, mustard, horseradish, cider, vinegar):

Broccolifits better
Shallotfits better
Radishfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, mustard, horseradish, cider, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.