Skip to main content
Dessert

Green Tomato Mincemeat

A sweet and spiced mixture of green tomatoes, raisins, and brown sugar, simmered with spices and butter, finished with vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Tomato Mincemeat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Chop the green tomatoes finely and drain them.

  2. Add enough water to replace what drains away and boil until tender.

Make the mincemeat

  1. Stir in the brown sugar, raisins, salt, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and butter.

  2. Boil the mixture until thick, then add the vinegar and boil a little longer.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Nutmeg + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 filling and soften into a moist, tender base as they boil.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the mixture as it cooks down.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the filling.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet, spiced flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until thick, then add the vinegar. Cooking the mixture down until thick concentrates the filling and sets its texture. Adding the vinegar near the end keeps its sharp flavour from cooking off.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, raisin, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raisin, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, butter. 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.

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes