Skip to main content
Dessert

Southern Tomato Pie

A pie made with sliced green tomatoes, sugar, nutmeg or cinnamon, and two pie crusts, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and nutmeg work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 879 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Southern Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Peel the green tomatoes.

  2. Slice the peeled tomatoes.

  3. Combine the sliced tomatoes with sugar in a bowl.

  4. Add nutmeg or cinnamon to flavor the mixture.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the mixture into a pie crust.

  2. Cover with another pie crust.

  3. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until golden brown.

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. Tomato + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together879 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + tomatotop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 filling bulk and a tart, savory flavor base for the pie.
Sugar
Sweetens the tomatoes and draws out moisture that helps form the filling.
Pie crusts
Form the enclosing shell that holds the filling while it bakes.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, nutmeg):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes