Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Tomato Pickles

A pickled tomato dish flavored with vinegar, sugar, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, mustard seed, and peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 the tomatoes

  1. Slice the tomatoes and let them stand overnight in a weak brine made with ½ cup coarse sea salt.

  2. Wash the tomatoes several times to remove the briny taste.

Cook the pickles

  1. Combine 1 gallon of vinegar and 3 pounds of brown sugar in a kettle. Heat together and skim.

  2. Place 2 tablespoons each of whole cloves, whole allspice, and whole cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of mustard seed, and a few black peppercorns in a spice bag.

  3. Add the spice bag and tomatoes to the kettle and cook very slowly until tender.

Jar and store

  1. Transfer the pickles to jars and let them cool.

  2. Store the jars in a dark place.

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the pickle and soften into tender pieces during slow cooking.
Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup that the tomatoes absorb.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the pickles and gives them their tang.
Whole cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook very slowly until tender. Cooking gently lets the tomatoes soften and absorb the syrup without breaking apart or scorching the sugar. High heat can burn the sugar and turn the flesh mushy.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice, cinnamon, mustard. 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 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes