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Dessert

Red Tomato Preserve

A preserve made by boiling red tomatoes in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and tomato work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Red Tomato Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully without breaking them.

  2. The night before preserving, layer the tomatoes in white granulated sugar, pound for pound.

Cook

  1. In the morning, pour the syrup into a porcelain kettle and bring it to a boil.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the boiling syrup, being careful not to crowd them.

  3. Boil the tomatoes for about 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the tomatoes with a skimmer and place them in large platters.

  5. Put the platters in the oven.

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 + tomatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Red pear-shaped tomatoes
Provide the fruit that is softened and preserved in the sugar syrup.
White granulated sugar
Draws moisture out of the tomatoes and forms the syrup that preserves them and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the tomatoes to the boiling syrup without crowding them. Crowding drops the syrup's temperature and slows its return to a boil, so the tomatoes can stew instead of cooking evenly. Keeping space between them lets the syrup stay hot and circulate around each piece.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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