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Green Tomato Pickle

A pickled green tomato and onion relish made with vinegar, sugar, spices, and red pepper strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash the tomatoes and cut them into ¼ inch slices.

  2. Peel the onions and cut them into very thin slices.

  3. Arrange the tomatoes and onions in alternate layers in a bowl, sprinkling each layer with salt.

  4. Weight down with a plate and let stand overnight.

  5. Drain.

Make the pickle

  1. Heat the vinegar to boiling.

  2. Add the sugar.

  3. Add the red peppers cut into thin strips.

  4. Add the spices tied in cheesecloth.

  5. Add the vegetables and cook slowly for 1 hour or until the tomatoes are clear.

Store

  1. Seal in bottles or keep closely covered in a crock in a cold place.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 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
Provide the bulk of the pickle and become translucent as they cook in the sweet vinegar.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the tomatoes and onions, firming them before they are drained.
Diluted vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the pickle and balances the sweetness.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the syrup as the pickle cooks down.
Mustard seed
Contributes a pungent, slightly bitter aroma that flavors the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the vegetables slowly until the tomatoes are clear. Cooking gently lets the tomatoes soften and become translucent while absorbing the syrup. Boiling hard can break the slices apart and leave the pickle mushy or unevenly cooked.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, vinegar, sugar, mustard, clove, allspice, cinnamon. 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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