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Dessert

Green Tomato Preserves

Preserved green tomatoes cooked with sugar, lemon juice, and ginger-mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Green Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pierce each tomato with a fork.

  2. Combine tomatoes, sugar, lemon juice, and ginger-mace mixture in a pot.

Cook

  1. Heat slowly and boil until the fruit is clear.

  2. Remove the tomatoes with a perforated skimmer.

  3. Boil the syrup until thick.

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. Ginger + macetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

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

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve and become tender and translucent as they cook in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as it concentrates, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Sugar syrup thickens as water evaporates and sugar concentrates. Stopping too early leaves a thin syrup, while overcooking can make the syrup crystallise or turn too stiff.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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