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Dessert

Tomato Fig-s

A dish of tomatoes layered with sugar, dried, then rolled in powdered sugar to resemble figs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,667 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Tomato Fig-s

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and peel the tomatoes with a sharp knife.

  2. Layer tomatoes and sugar alternately in a stone jar.

  3. Let it stand overnight.

Make the syrup

  1. Pour off the syrup and boil for 10 minutes until a syrup forms, for three mornings.

  2. Allow tomatoes to remain in the syrup for three days.

Shape and dry

  1. Roll the tomatoes in powdered sugar.

  2. Press enough tomatoes together to form the shape of a fig and dry on plates.

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 + 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

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk that softens, shrinks and becomes chewy as they lose water.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and sweetens them, helping preserve them.
Powdered sugar
Coats the outside of the pieces, adding sweetness and reducing stickiness.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup over three mornings. Repeated boiling thickens the syrup and pulls water out of the tomatoes gradually. Boiling it once would not concentrate it enough, and the tomatoes would stay soft and wet.

“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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