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Dessert

Obeen Tomato Pie

A sweet pie made with stewed tomato, lemon, sugar, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,592 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Obeen Tomato Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomato

  1. Wash the tomato and remove the center.

  2. Insert a piece of lemon into the tomato.

Make the filling

  1. Stew the tomato with ¾ pound of sugar until well done.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the stewed tomato in puff pastry.

  2. Bake the pie until golden brown.

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

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Tomato
Forms the main filling and supplies moisture and body to the pie.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws water out of the tomato during stewing, thickening the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms the crust, providing flaky layers and golden browning in the oven.

The step that matters

Stew the tomato until well done. Stewing evaporates water and concentrates the sugar, so the filling becomes thick. A runny filling can soak the pastry and leave it soggy, while overcooking can turn it into a dry paste.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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