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Frosted Tomato Pickle

A pickled tomato relish with onions, red pepper, spices, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Frosted Tomato Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Place sliced tomatoes, onions, and red pepper in separate jars.

  2. Sprinkle the jars with coarse sea salt.

  3. Let the jars stand for 24 hours.

  4. Drain the contents in a bag overnight.

Make the pickle

  1. In a bowl, mix mace, cinnamon, ginger, ground mustard, allspice, and brown sugar until fine.

  2. Layer the drained vegetables and spice mixture alternately in a porcelain kettle.

  3. Fill the kettle with cider vinegar.

  4. Boil until tender.

  5. Let cool before using.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 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. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 give it its firm, tangy vegetable body.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth as they soften during boiling.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the vinegar and helps build a syrupy pickling liquid.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the vegetables and gives the pickle its sharp tang.

The step that matters

Drain the salted vegetables overnight. Salt draws water out of the vegetables through osmosis. Draining removes that liquid so the pickle does not become watery and the vinegar and spices can be absorbed more evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, onion, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, mustard, allspice):

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, mustard, allspice. 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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