Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Rarebit

A tomato and cheese sauce served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato Rarebit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the chopped tomato and cook until soft.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve back into the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Return to the heat and add lemon juice, catsup, salt, pepper, and cheese.

  2. Cook until the cheese is melted.

  3. Serve on hot, buttered toast.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + cheesetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,896 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

Butter
Adds richness and helps the tomato mixture feel smooth and silky.
Tomato
Supplies the main body and fresh, acidic flavor of the topping.
Grated cheese
Melts into the sauce to add savoriness and a creamy, binding texture.
Catsup
Adds sweetness and tang that deepen the tomato flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the cheese until just melted. Cheese turns stringy and oily if overheated, so it should be stirred in over gentle heat until it melts smoothly into the sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, tomato, pepper, cheese):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, tomato, pepper, cheese. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipes