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Ripe Tomato Preserves

A preserve made by cooking ripe tomatoes with sugar, ginger, lemon, and egg white until dark and clear.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ripe Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes.

  2. Mix the tomatoes with the brown sugar and beaten egg white.

Cook

  1. Place the mixture in a porcelain kettle and gradually add the sugar, skimming frequently.

  2. When the scum ceases to rise, add the lemon juice and rind.

  3. Boil slowly for an hour or more until the preserve is dark and clear.

Jar

  1. Pour the hot preserve into jars and seal.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,887 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve and its fruity base flavour.
Brown sugar
Sweetens and thickens the preserve as it cooks down, and helps it turn dark.
Egg white
Its proteins rise with the scum during cooking, so skimming them off clarifies the preserve.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum. Foam from the tomatoes and egg white must be removed as it rises, or it cooks back into the preserve and makes it cloudy and off-flavoured. Skim frequently until the scum stops forming.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, lemon, egg. 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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