Skip to main content
Dessert

Tomatoe Preserves

A preserve made from small tomatoes, lemon juice, sugar, ginger, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Tomatoe Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose small, plump tomatoes; peel and prick them with a large needle.

Cook and harden

  1. Boil the tomatoes slowly in preserving syrup for 30 minutes, adding the juice of one lemon and a small bag of ginger root.

  2. Remove the tomatoes and let them sit in the sun for 2-3 hours to harden.

Clarify and finish

  1. Add the egg white to the syrup, boil, and skim well.

  2. Pour the syrup over the tomatoes.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 red or yellow tomatoes
Provide the fruit that is preserved, holding its shape when boiled gently in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a thick syrup, helps preserve it.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Egg white
Clarifies the syrup: as it boils it collects impurities that are then skimmed off.
Ginger root
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the tomatoes slowly. A gentle simmer keeps the skins intact and the fruit firm. A hard boil breaks the skins and softens the flesh, while slow heat lets the syrup penetrate gradually.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, ginger, egg. 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.

More tomato preserves recipes

Green 21Yellow 8Spiced 3 See all 76 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes