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Green Tomato Pickle

A pickled green tomato and pepper relish seasoned with salt, spices, sugar, mustard, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 the tomatoes

  1. Chop the green tomatoes and green peppers finely.

  2. Sprinkle with 1 pint of coarse sea salt and let stand overnight.

  3. Drain for 2 hours.

Cook and pack

  1. Cover with vinegar and cook slowly for 1 hour.

  2. Drain again and pack into a jar.

Add the spice mixture

  1. In a separate bowl, mix 2 pounds of brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of cinnamon, 1 tablespoon each of allspice, cloves, black pepper, and celery seed, ½ cup of ground mustard or 2 cups of mustard seed, and 1 pint of grated horseradish.

  2. Pour the mixture over the pickles while 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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften slowly in the vinegar, becoming tender while keeping their shape.
Green peppers
Add crisp-tender texture and a fresh, vegetal bite that contrasts with the sweet spiced liquid.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the chopped vegetables so they drain well and stay firmer during cooking.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the sweet-sour syrup and balances the vinegar's acidity.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it its tart flavor.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that deepens the spiced sweet-sour profile.

The step that matters

Drain thoroughly after salting and again after cooking. Salt draws water out of the chopped vegetables, and removing the released liquid keeps the pickle from diluting the vinegar and spice mixture. Incomplete draining leaves the pack watery and can weaken the finished pickle's texture and flavor.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, clove, celery. 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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