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Stuffed Tomatoes

Tomatoes stuffed with a forcemeat of fowl, parsley, ham, egg yolk, anchovy, and butter, baked and served with lemon and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Stuffed Tomatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Make a forcemeat by pounding the fowl, parsley, ham, egg yolk, anchovy, and dissolved butter into a paste.

Fill the tomatoes

  1. Wipe each tomato, cut off the stem, and scoop out the seeds.

  2. Fill the tomatoes with the forcemeat.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 10-15 minutes.

  2. Serve on a hot dish with cut lemons and cayenne pepper on the side.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Egg + anchovytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Anchovy + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold fowl or veal
Provides the main body of the forcemeat, giving it a firm, meaty texture.
Cooked ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the forcemeat.
Hard boiled egg yolk
Enriches the forcemeat and helps bind it into a smooth paste.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the forcemeat as it is dissolved in.
Ripe tomatoes
Serve as the hollow shell that holds the filling and softens during baking.

“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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