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Tomato Preserves

A sweet tomato preserve made by cooking peeled tomatoes with sugar and water, optionally adding sliced lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,592 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes, then plunge them into cold water.

  2. Cut the tomatoes in half to remove the seeds and rinse them in cold water.

  3. Weigh the cleaned tomatoes and use 1 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

Cook the preserves

  1. Make a syrup with the sugar and enough water until thick.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the syrup and cook slowly until done, being careful not to burn them.

  3. Add sliced lemon to the preserves when they are about half done, if desired.

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

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

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

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

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the fruit that is cooked down into the preserve, supplying the bulk and body of the dish.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at high concentration in the syrup, helps preserve the fruit and thicken it.

The step that matters

Cook slowly without burning. Sugar syrup thickens as water evaporates and sugar concentrates, and sugars scorch easily at high heat. Slow cooking lets the tomatoes soften and the syrup set without caramelizing or darkening the fruit.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Cherryfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar. 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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