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Preserve

Preserved Tomatoes

Preserved tomatoes are tomatoes preserved in a sugar and lemon juice syrup.

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 ↓

Preserved Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Peel the tomatoes and let them stand overnight with the sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Drain off the syrup and boil it, skimming well.

Cook and pack

  1. Add the tomatoes to the boiling syrup and cook gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the tomatoes with a skimmer and spread them on dishes to cool.

  3. Boil the syrup until thick, then place the tomatoes in jars and fill with syrup.

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
Provide the fruit that is cooked and preserved, giving the dish its body and flavour.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and thickens the syrup, helping preserve the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the syrup balanced.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Sugar concentration determines how well the tomatoes keep. If the syrup is not boiled down far enough, it stays thin and the preserve can spoil sooner.

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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