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Tomato Toast

Tomato Toast is a toasted bread topped with stewed tomatoes, butter, salt, pepper, sugar, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tomato Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Sift the stewed tomatoes through a colander into a porcelain stew-pan.

  2. Season the tomatoes with butter, coarse sea salt, black pepper, and sugar.

  3. Add the sweet cream to the tomatoes.

Prepare the toast

  1. Cut the bread into thin slices.

  2. Brown the slices on both sides.

  3. Butter the toasted bread.

  4. Place the bread on a platter.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture very hot over the toast.

  2. Serve immediately after adding the cream.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stewed tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, providing moisture, acidity and bulk.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and fat, mellowing the tomato acidity into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the sauce and to the toasted bread.
Bread
Provides a crisp, absorbent base that soaks up the hot sauce.

The step that matters

Add the cream and serve immediately. Cold cream added to very hot tomatoes can split or curdle, and the toast softens quickly once sauced, so the dish should be assembled and served right away.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sugar, bread, cream):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, bread, cream. 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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