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Sweet Tomato Pickles

A pickled green tomato and onion relish made with vinegar, salt, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweet Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Layer sliced green tomatoes and onions in a large bowl, sprinkling salt over them, and let sit overnight.

  2. Drain the vegetables and rinse them.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. Combine water and vinegar in a pot and bring to a boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

Cook the pickle

  1. Add the strained liquid, vinegar, brown sugar, mustard seed, allspice, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper to the same pot.

  2. Boil the mixture for 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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften into tender pieces during cooking.
Onions
Add savory body and sweetness that softens as the pickle cooks.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the pickle.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Mustard seed
Releases pungent, sharp flavor into the hot pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Drain and rinse after salting. Salt drawn out of the vegetables overnight can make the pickle too salty if it is not rinsed off before cooking.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, vinegar, sugar, mustard, allspice, clove, ginger):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, vinegar, sugar, mustard, allspice, clove, ginger. 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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