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Tomato Preserves

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 Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully.

  2. Prick each tomato with a needle to prevent bursting.

  3. Weigh the tomatoes and add an equal amount of sugar.

  4. Let the mixture sit overnight.

Make the syrup

  1. Pour off the juice into a preserve kettle.

  2. Boil until it thickens into a syrup, clarifying with the egg white.

  3. Add the tomatoes.

  4. Boil carefully until they look transparent.

  5. Optionally, add slices of root ginger or lemon for flavor.

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. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,887 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the preserve itself and provide the fruit body that turns translucent when cooked in syrup.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that preserves the tomatoes and gives the sweetness and body of the preserve.
Egg white
Binds impurities to rise and be skimmed, clarifying the syrup for a clear result.

The step that matters

Boil carefully until the tomatoes look transparent. Boiling too hard can break or burst the tomatoes, while too gentle heat leaves them opaque. Gentle, controlled simmering lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, which is what makes them look clear.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Corianderfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pear, 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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