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Dessert

Tomato Jelly

A preserve made by stewing tomatoes, extracting juice, adding sugar, and boiling until it sets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,667 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Tomato Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Break ripe tomatoes into pieces.

  2. Stew the tomato pieces in just enough water to prevent burning.

  3. Pour the mixture into a jelly bag.

  4. Let the juice run through the bag.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pound of juice to the collected juice.

  2. Return the mixture to the stove.

  3. Boil until it jellies.

  4. Serve with roast meat.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the juice, along with natural pectin and acidity that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, when boiled with the juice, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Sugar and pectin set into a gel only at a high enough concentration, so the cook must boil long enough to reach it. Stopping too early leaves a runny jelly, while overboiling can make it stiff and cloudy.

“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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