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Dessert

Tomato Preserves

A sweet tomato preserve made with sugar, ginger, lemon, and tartaric acid.

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

Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully.

  2. Prick each tomato with a needle and let them sit overnight with their weight in sugar.

Make the preserves

  1. Pour off the juice and boil it until it becomes a thick syrup.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the syrup and cook until they look transparent.

  3. Add a small piece of ginger root and a sliced lemon for every pound of fruit.

  4. To prevent the preserves from sugaring, add a very small amount of tartaric acid.

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Yellow egg tomatoes
Form the bulk of the preserves and supply the fruit that turns transparent in syrup.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and thickens the syrup, preserving the fruit and adding sweetness.
Tartaric acid
Adds acidity and helps prevent the sugar from crystallising, keeping the preserves smooth.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness of the syrup.
Ginger root
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the preserves.

The step that matters

Cooking the tomatoes in the syrup until transparent. Cooking gently lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit so it becomes translucent and firm. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave the fruit cloudy, shrivelled or still watery, and the syrup may not set properly.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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