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Stewed Tomatas

Stewed tomatoes simmered in vegetable gravy with arrowroot or flour, butter, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stewed Tomatas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Arrange the tomatoes in a single layer.

  2. Pour enough vegetable gravy to reach half their height.

Stew and thicken

  1. Stew them gently until the undersides are cooked, then turn and finish stewing.

  2. Thicken the gravy with a little arrowroot and cream, or with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the gravy around the tomatoes.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + arrowroottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Arrowroot + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Arrowroot + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 dish and soften into tender pieces while stewing.
Vegetable gravy
Provides liquid that gently cooks the tomatoes and forms the sauce.
Arrowroot or flour
Thickens the gravy so it clings to the tomatoes instead of running thin.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the gravy when flour is used as the thickener.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the thickened gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently and turn once. Gentle heat cooks the undersides through without breaking the tomatoes apart. Turning them once lets the tops cook evenly, so the pieces hold their shape while the gravy thickens around them.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (arrowroot, butter, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, butter, cream. 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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