Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Tomatoes

Stuffed tomatoes filled with rice and lamb, baked until tender.

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

Why it works: Tomato and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Cut off the top or stem end of the tomatoes.

  2. Scoop out the seeds with the handle of a spoon, leaving the walls intact.

  3. Sprinkle the inside of the tomatoes with salt and turn them upside down to drain.

Stuff and bake

  1. Stuff the tomatoes with the mixture of boiled rice and minced lamb or mutton.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 35 to 40 minutes.

  3. Serve plain or with cream sauce.

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 + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Rice + lambtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together439 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + lambtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together979 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Hold the filling and soften as they bake, releasing juice that moistens the stuffing.
Boiled rice
Bulks out the filling and absorbs juices, giving the stuffing a soft, tender texture.
Minced lamb or mutton
Adds savory richness and fat to the filling, so it tastes full and meaty.

The step that matters

Draining the salted tomatoes. Salt draws water out of the tomato walls and turning them upside down lets excess juice run off. Skipping this leaves the filling soggy and can make the shells collapse as they bake.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, lamb):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, lamb. 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.

More stuffed tomatoes recipes

Baked 22Shrimp 6Cheese 4with Mushrooms 4Celery 3Cucumber 3 See all 305 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes