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Ripe Tomato Preserves

Preserves made from ripe tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice, cooked until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Ripe Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Combine the tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice in a bowl and let them stand overnight.

  2. Drain off the syrup.

Cook

  1. Boil the syrup, skimming off any foam.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the boiling syrup and cook gently for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove the tomatoes with a perforated skimmer and spread them on dishes.

  4. Boil the syrup until it thickens, adding the juice of 3 lemons just before removing from heat.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the fruit into jars and fill with hot syrup.

  2. Once cooled, seal or tie the jars.

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

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve and release juice that mingles with the syrup.
Sugar
Draws out moisture and, once boiled, thickens the syrup and preserves the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until it thickens. Sugar must concentrate enough in the syrup to thicken it and preserve the fruit. Undercooked syrup stays thin and may spoil, while overcooking can make the preserve too stiff or sugary.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, 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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