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Sweet Tomato Pickles

Pickled tomatoes with onions, peppers, spices, and a sweet vinegar-sugar brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Sweet Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the tomatoes

  1. Slice the tomatoes and mix with 1 cup of coarse sea salt.

  2. Let sit overnight.

  3. Drain and press out the brine.

Pack the jars

  1. Layer the tomatoes in jars with sliced onions and sliced peppers, adding mustard seed and celery seed.

Spice and pour the syrup

  1. In a pot, cook vinegar and sugar with cinnamon and cloves (tied in a muslin bag) for 10 minutes.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the pickles.

Repeat the boiling

  1. After a few days, drain off the liquid and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Repeat this process 2 or 3 times at intervals of a few days, boiling the liquid for about 10 minutes each time.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften as they absorb the salt and syrup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the tomatoes, firming them and removing excess brine before pickling.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their tang.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness and helps form the syrup.
Onions
Add savoury flavour and moisture that blends into the syrup.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Draining and re-boiling the syrup. Repeated boiling of the syrup concentrates its sugar and vinegar and keeps the pickles preserved, so each boil should be done fully rather than skipped.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cinnamon, clove, pepper, mustard, sugar, celery):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cinnamon, clove, pepper, mustard, sugar, celery. 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.

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