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Dessert

Green Tomato Preserves

A preserve made from small green tomatoes, sugar, lemon, spices, and ginger, boiled into a thick syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Green Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Pierce each tomato with a fork.

  2. In a large pot, combine tomatoes, sugar, lemons, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger.

  3. Heat slowly and boil until the tomatoes look clear.

Finish and jar

  1. Remove the tomatoes with a perforated skimmer and place them on large platters.

  2. Boil the syrup until very thick, then pour it over the hot tomatoes in glass jars and seal.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens and thickens the syrup, and helps preserve the tomatoes.
Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve, absorbing syrup as they cook.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavor.
Whole ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until very thick. Sugar concentration is what preserves the fruit and sets the syrup. If the syrup is not boiled down enough, it stays thin and the preserve may spoil or fail to set.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, clove, cinnamon, 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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