Name: Tomato Syrup
Ingredients: 4 cups tomato juice; 1 pound sugar

Tomato Syrup

A sweet tomato syrup made by extracting tomato juice, adding sugar, bottling, aging, and mixing with water for a refreshing drink.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients

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 Syrup

Ingredients

4 cups tomato juice
1 pound sugar

Directions

Make the syrup

Extract the juice from the tomatoes.
Add 1 pound of sugar to each quart (4 cups) of juice.
Bottle the mixture.

Rest and serve

Let it sit for a few weeks until it resembles pure wine.
Mix with water for a refreshing drink.

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.

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

Tomato juice: Provides the liquid base and the tomato flavour of the syrup.
Sugar: Sweetens the juice and helps preserve the syrup during its long rest.

“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.