Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Preserves

A sweet tomato preserve made by cooking tomatoes with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Preserves

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the tomatoes using a sharp knife.

  2. Pour enough water into a preserving kettle to cover the bottom an inch deep.

  3. Measure the tomatoes and add them to the kettle.

  4. Add an equal amount of sugar to the tomatoes.

Cook

  1. Cook slowly for several hours until the syrup is thick and the preserves are a rich brown.

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

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk and the fruit flavour of the preserves.
Sugar
Thickens the syrup and sweetens the preserves while helping them keep.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for several hours. Slow cooking lets water evaporate gradually so the syrup thickens and the sugars caramelise to a rich brown. Cooking too fast can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the kettle before the tomatoes soften and the syrup reaches the right thickness.

“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.

More tomato preserves recipes

Green 21Yellow 8Spiced 3 See all 76 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes