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Sweet Pickled Tomatoes

A sweet pickled tomato preserve made with tomatoes, spices, sugar, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Sprinkle sliced tomatoes with coarse sea salt and let them stand for 4 hours.

  2. Soak tomatoes in clear cold water for 4 hours, then drain well.

Pickle

  1. Place tomatoes in a preserving kettle.

  2. Add black pepper, red pepper, allspice, cloves, white mustard seed, parboiled onions, celery seed, and brown sugar.

  3. Cover with cider vinegar and boil until the vinegar is clear.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and absorb the spiced, sweet-sour liquid.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and body, balancing the sharp cider vinegar.
Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the tomatoes and gives the pickle its tang.
Onions
Add savory flavour and soft texture once parboiled and folded into the pickle.
Salt
Draws water out of the sliced tomatoes so they stay firmer in the pickle.

The step that matters

Drawing out the tomatoes. Salting and soaking pull water out of the sliced tomatoes. If they are drained poorly or not soaked long enough, excess moisture dilutes the vinegar syrup and leaves the pickle watery and soft.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, allspice, clove, mustard, celery, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, allspice, clove, mustard, celery, 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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