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Winter Tomatoes

A method of preserving tomatoes by stewing, bottling, and sealing with rosin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Winter Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Peel and remove the hard parts from the tomatoes.

  2. Add a little coarse sea salt and red pepper.

  3. Stew the tomatoes until thick enough to bottle.

Bottle and seal

  1. Place the bottles in an oven with straw around them to prevent breaking.

  2. Fill the oven with lukewarm water and let it boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Cork the bottles tightly while in the oven to make them airtight.

  4. Seal the bottles with rosin.

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 + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Main ingredient; stewing thickens them into a concentrated sauce suitable for bottling.
Red pepper
Adds pungent heat and aroma to the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Stew the tomatoes until thick enough to bottle. Cooking down the tomatoes reduces their water content, so the sauce is thicker and less likely to spoil in sealed bottles. Stopping early leaves more water that can support spoilage.

“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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