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Tomato Preserve

A sweet tomato preserve made by boiling tomatoes with sugar and clarifying with egg white.

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 Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully. Prick each tomato with a needle to prevent bursting.

  2. Weigh the tomatoes and add an equal amount of sugar. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Make the syrup

  1. Pour the juice into a preserving kettle. Boil the juice until it becomes a thick syrup.

  2. Clarify the syrup with the egg white.

Cook the preserve

  1. Add the tomatoes to the syrup. Boil the mixture carefully until the tomatoes look transparent.

  2. If desired, add ginger-root or lemon slices while cooking.

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

Tomatoes
Provide the fruit, flesh and juice that reduce into the syrup and form the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit, draws water out of the tomatoes and thickens the syrup.
Egg white
Clarifies the syrup: as it cooks it traps impurities, which are then skimmed away.

The step that matters

Boil the tomatoes carefully. Vigorous boiling can split the skins and turn the tomatoes to mush. A gentle simmer in the thick syrup lets the sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, so the pieces stay whole and turn clear.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sugar, egg, lemon):

  1. Corianderfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, egg, 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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