Skip to main content
Salad

Stuffed Tomato Salad

A salad of hollowed tomatoes filled with a mixture of cabbage, green pepper, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 622 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Peel the tomatoes, cut a thin slice from the top of each, and remove the pulp.

  2. Invert the tomatoes and let them stand on ice for 30 minutes.

Fill and serve

  1. Mix the cabbage and green pepper, season with salt, pepper, and celery salt, and add enough mayonnaise dressing to moisten.

  2. Refill the tomatoes with the mixture.

  3. Top each tomato with a spoonful of mayonnaise dressing and serve on a lettuce leaf.

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. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 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
Hollowed out to hold the filling, and their juices drain while they stand on ice.
Cabbage
Provides crisp texture and bulk for the filling.
Mayonnaise dressing
Moistens the filling and adds richness and creamy flavor.
Green pepper
Adds fresh, slightly bitter crunch to the filling.

The step that matters

Letting the inverted tomatoes stand on ice. Standing the hollowed tomatoes upside down on ice lets excess juice drain out, so the filling stays firm and the dressing does not thin into a watery pool.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, pepper, celery, lettuce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, pepper, celery, 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 SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipes