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Tomatoes Au Gratin

Tomatoes au Gratin is a baked tomato dish stuffed with ham, mushrooms, breadcrumbs, egg, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tomatoes Au Gratin

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cut each tomato in half crosswise and remove the seeds and water, keeping the outsides whole.

Stuff and bake

  1. Stuff the tomatoes with minced ham, chopped cooked mushrooms, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, and moisten with the egg.

  2. Place the stuffed tomatoes in a baking dish, sprinkle with bread crumbs, and add a small piece of butter on top.

  3. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh tomatoes
Form the shell that holds the filling, softening as they bake and releasing moisture.
Egg
Binds the stuffing so it holds together rather than falling out of the tomatoes.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the filling and add body, and browning on the top when baked.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crumb topping brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Remove the seeds and water from the tomatoes. Excess liquid left in the tomato will thin the stuffing and make the filling soggy and watery as it bakes, so the tomato halves should be emptied before filling.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, mushroom, bread, pepper, egg, butter):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, mushroom, bread, pepper, egg, butter. 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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