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Salad

Frozen Tomato Salad

A chilled salad of tomato pulp, seasoned with vinegar, salt, pepper, onion juice, served with walnuts, lettuce, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Frozen Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomato

  1. Drain the large pieces of pulp from the canned tomatoes and press them through a sieve.

  2. Season the tomato pulp with coarse sea salt, black pepper, tarragon vinegar, and onion juice.

Freeze

  1. Place the mixture in the freezer and freeze until firm, like a water ice.

  2. Remove the mixture from the freezer and stir the mixture well.

  3. Repack the freezer.

  4. Let it chill in the cellar for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Grate or finely chop the English walnuts.

  2. Serve the frozen tomato on a bed of lettuce leaves and sprinkle with walnuts.

  3. Serve mayonnaise in a bowl on the side.

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. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Tarragon + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Tomato + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together391 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the main body of the salad, providing the pulp that freezes into a water-ice texture.
English walnuts
Add a crunchy, slightly bitter contrast to the soft, cold tomato.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and fat that softens the sharp acidity of the tomato.

The step that matters

Stirring the partly frozen mixture. Stirring breaks up ice crystals as the pulp freezes, so the result is a smooth, granular texture rather than a solid block of ice.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, walnut, lettuce):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, walnut, lettuce. 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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