Skip to main content
Main

Green Tomato Sweet Pickle

A sweet pickle made from green tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Green Tomato Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Gather fully grown green tomatoes just before they ripen.

  2. Slice off the top and bottom, and remove the seeds.

  3. Soak the tomatoes in a mixture of salt and water for two weeks.

  4. Rinse the tomatoes in fresh water to remove the salt.

  5. Boil the tomatoes in alum water until tender but not broken.

Make the syrup and pickle

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, sugar, white ginger, cloves, stick cinnamon, and mace.

  2. Boil the mixture together.

  3. Pour the mixture over the tomatoes three times.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Fully grown fruit forms the body of the pickle and holds its shape after simmering.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the tomatoes and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Sugar
Balances the vinegar's sharpness with sweetness and helps thicken the syrup.
Salt
Draws water out of the tomatoes during the long soak, firming their texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the tomatoes in alum water until tender but not broken. Alum helps the tomato walls stay firm when heated. Boiling too long softens the flesh until it collapses, so the tomatoes should be checked often and removed once tender.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, vinegar, sugar, ginger, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, vinegar, sugar, ginger, clove, cinnamon. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes