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Dessert

Tomato Preserves

A sweet tomato preserve made with tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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. Peel the tomatoes.

  2. Combine the tomatoes and sugar in a bowl and let them sit overnight.

  3. Drain off the syrup.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil the syrup, skimming off any foam.

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

  3. Remove the fruit with a perforated skimmer and spread it on dishes.

  4. Boil the syrup until it thickens, then add the lemon juice just before finishing.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the fruit in jars and pour the hot syrup over it.

  2. Once cooled, seal or tie up 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. 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

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the fruit and release juice that the sugar draws out into syrup.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes to form a thick syrup and preserves the fruit through sweetness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it thickens. Sugar must reach a high enough concentration to thicken the syrup and help preserve the fruit. Undercooked syrup stays thin and spoils sooner, while overcooked syrup can turn hard or caramelize.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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