Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Tomato Pickles

A pickled mixture of green tomatoes and quartered apples sweetened with sugar and spiced with cloves, allspice, peppers, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stick 2 cloves into each quartered apple.

  2. Tie all spices in muslin bags.

Cook

  1. In a large pot, combine vinegar, sugar, and spice bags; bring to a boil.

  2. Add tomatoes and apples; boil until tender.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + peppertop 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
Make up the bulk of the pickle and soften into the sweet-sour pieces as they cook.
Apples
Add natural pectin and tartness that help the pickle hold together and balance the sugar.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the pickle.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the vinegar and thickens the syrup as it cooks.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the tomatoes and apples until tender. Cooking too long breaks the fruit down into mush, while stopping too early leaves firm, raw-tasting pieces. Tenderness is checked by texture, since the pieces keep softening as they cool.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, clove, vinegar, sugar, allspice, pepper, cinnamon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, clove, vinegar, sugar, allspice, pepper, cinnamon. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipes