Skip to main content
Dessert

Yellow Tomato Preserves

Preserves made from peeled tomatoes and sugar, cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Yellow Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Macerate

  1. Cover the peeled tomatoes with sugar and let them stand overnight.

Cook and can

  1. Drain off the juice and cook it until thick.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the thickened juice and cook for 30 minutes or until thick enough for your preference.

  3. Can the preserves.

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 and body of the preserves, softening into a thick, jammy texture as they cook.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and thickens the juice, while adding sweetness and helping the preserves keep.

The step that matters

Thickening the juice before adding the tomatoes. Sugar pulls water out of the tomatoes, so the juice must be cooked down until thick before the fruit goes back in. Reducing it concentrates the sugar, which sets the texture and helps the preserves keep.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes