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Yellow Tomato Preserves

A sweet preserve made from yellow tomatoes, sugar, and lemon.

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 ↓

Yellow Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the tomatoes and remove all the seeds.

Make the preserves

  1. Boil the tomatoes with an equal weight of granulated sugar.

  2. After the syrup has boiled clear, add the lemon juice and grated rind.

  3. Simmer for 30 to 40 minutes longer.

Jar

  1. Pour the preserves into jars.

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

Yellow tomatoes
Provide the fruit bulk and body of the preserves once cooked down.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and thickens the syrup while helping preserve the fruit.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness and helps the preserves set.

The step that matters

Simmering until thick. Sugar concentration and acidity must rise together during the long simmer. Too short a cook leaves the preserves runny, while overcooking can scorch the sugar or make them stiff.

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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