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Ripe Tomato Preserves

A preserve made by cooking peeled tomatoes with sugar and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,592 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ripe Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the peeled tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice in a bowl.

  2. Let the mixture stand overnight.

  3. Drain off the syrup.

Make the preserves

  1. Boil the syrup, skimming off any foam.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the boiling syrup.

  3. Cook gently for 20 minutes.

  4. Remove the tomatoes with a skimmer.

  5. Spread the tomatoes on dishes.

  6. Boil the syrup until it thickens.

  7. Add the lemon juice just before removing from heat.

  8. Remove the syrup from heat.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the fruit into jars.

  2. Fill the jars with hot syrup.

  3. Seal the jars once cooled.

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. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provides the fruit, which softens in the syrup while keeping its shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and thickens the syrup while drawing water out of the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps the syrup set.

The step that matters

Cook the tomatoes gently. Vigorous boiling breaks the fruit apart and makes it mushy. Gentle heat lets the sugar syrup penetrate slowly, so the tomatoes stay whole and firm.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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