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Tomato Preserves

A preserved tomato mixture sweetened with sugar and optionally flavored with ginger or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully.

  2. Weigh the tomatoes and add an equal amount of sugar.

  3. Let the mixture sit overnight.

Cook

  1. Pour off the juice into a preserving kettle and boil until it becomes a thick syrup.

  2. Add the tomatoes and boil carefully until they look transparent.

  3. If desired, add a piece of ginger root or one sliced lemon while cooking.

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. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  3. Tomato + peartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

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

Small tomatoes
Provide the fruit that becomes the preserve, softening and turning translucent as they cook in syrup.
Sugar
Draws moisture out of the tomatoes and, once boiled, forms the thick syrup that preserves them.

The step that matters

Boil the tomatoes until transparent. Boiling the juice into a thick syrup first and then cooking the tomatoes gently keeps the fruit intact while sugar slowly replaces its water. Overcooking can break the tomatoes apart or make the syrup too stiff.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pear, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Corianderfits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pear, sugar. 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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