Skip to main content
Main

Touatoes and Nuts

A tomato stew with walnuts, served hot over buttered toast and lettuce, topped with salted whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Touatoes and Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Stew the tomatoes with chicken stock for 30 minutes.

  2. Mix the flour with a little stock and add it to the pot.

  3. Strain the liquid and let it cool.

  4. Reheat the strained liquid.

  5. Add walnuts, salt, pepper, butter, and beaten egg; simmer for 1 minute.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over buttered toast on blanched lettuce leaves.

  2. Top each portion with a teaspoon of salted whipped cream and serve hot.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Tomato + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,031 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and tangy flavour of the stew.
Flour
Thickens the stock so the stew has a smooth, body-rich texture.
Egg
Lightly sets and enriches the hot liquid, adding body to the stew.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, nutty flavour to the stew.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg. The egg must be added to hot, not boiling, liquid and stirred in gently at a simmer. Too much heat makes it scramble into curds instead of thickening the stew smoothly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, flour, walnut, pepper, butter, egg, lettuce):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, walnut, pepper, butter, egg, lettuce. 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 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipes