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Spiced Green Tomato Pickles

Pickled green tomatoes flavored with cloves, allspice, mustard, cinnamon, pepper, brown sugar, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Green Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the green tomatoes and let them stand in the salt and water for 2 hours.

  2. Drain the tomatoes through a colander, pressing out all the brine.

Cook

  1. Add the remaining ingredients to the tomatoes.

  2. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes, then simmer for about 1 hour.

Cool and store

  1. Allow to cool before serving. These pickles will keep indefinitely.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the pickle, and their firm flesh holds its shape during long simmering.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the tomato slices, firming them and seasoning them before cooking.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the pickles.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity and salt and helps thicken the syrup.

The step that matters

Draining and pressing out the brine. Salt pulls water out of the tomatoes, and any brine left behind would make the pickles overly salty. Thorough draining removes the excess salt so the spiced vinegar syrup can flavour the tomatoes evenly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, allspice, mustard, cider, vinegar, cinnamon, pepper):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, allspice, mustard, cider, vinegar, cinnamon, pepper. 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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