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Dessert

Tomato Pie

A baked pie filled with sliced tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Remove the skins from the tomatoes and slice them thin.

  2. Place the sliced tomatoes in the pie crust.

  3. Add sugar, vinegar, butter, and flour to the tomatoes.

  4. Put strips of pie crust across the top.

Bake

  1. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until thoroughly done.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Tomato + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Yellow tomatoes
Provide the main filling, releasing juice that becomes the sauce as they cook.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tomatoes' acidity.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor of the tomatoes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the filling.
Flour
Thickens the juices from the tomatoes as the pie bakes.

The step that matters

Bake until thoroughly done. Tomatoes release a lot of liquid as they cook. Baking long enough at a low temperature lets the flour thicken those juices and cooks the crust through, so the filling is not runny.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, butter, flour. 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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