Name: Green Tomato Pickles
Ingredients: 1 peck green tomatoes; coarse sea salt; 1 teaspoon ground spices (e.g., mustard seed, allspice, or similar)

Why it works: Tomato and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,482 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

1 peck green tomatoes
coarse sea salt
1 teaspoon ground spices (e.g., mustard seed, allspice, or similar)

Directions

Slice the green tomatoes and layer them in a jar, sprinkling a little coarse sea salt over each layer.
Let the tomatoes stand for 24 hours to drain off the liquid.
Transfer the tomatoes to a kettle and add 1 teaspoon of each chosen ground spice.

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.

Tomato + mustardtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,482 recipes

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

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