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Green Tomato Pickle

A pickled green tomato recipe with onions, spices, and vinegar.

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

  1. Thoroughly wash the tomatoes and cut them into ¼ inch slices.

  2. Peel the onions and slice them very thin.

  3. Sprinkle alternate layers of tomatoes and onions with salt, cover with a weighted plate, and let stand overnight; then drain.

  4. Mix the spices and divide them into two parts, tying each part in small pieces of cheesecloth.

  5. Remove seeds from the peppers and cut them into thin strips.

Cook

  1. Heat the vinegar and brown sugar with the spices and peppers to boiling point.

  2. Add the tomatoes and onions, and cook slowly for about 1 hour or until the tomatoes are clear.

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 slowly in the syrup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the tomatoes and onions overnight, firming them and concentrating flavour.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and helps build a rich syrup.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it its sharp, tangy character.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma, softening into the spiced syrup during the slow cook.

The step that matters

Slow cooking the tomatoes after adding them to the syrup. Cooking gently keeps the tomato slices intact while they absorb the sugared, spiced vinegar; a hard boil can break them down into mush.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, vinegar, 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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