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Tomato Preserves

A preserve made by simmering tomatoes in a sugar syrup flavored with lemon or ginger.

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. Scald the tomatoes by pouring boiling water over them.

  2. Let the tomatoes stand until cool.

Make the preserves

  1. Make a syrup with the sugar and bring it to a boil.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the boiling syrup.

  3. Simmer until the tomatoes become transparent.

  4. Flavor with lemon or ginger.

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. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Pear + tomatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Pear tomatoes
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and translucent as it cooks in syrup.
White sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the tomatoes and helps preserve them.

The step that matters

Simmer until the tomatoes become transparent. Sugar must penetrate the tomato flesh gradually; simmering slowly lets the syrup replace water inside the fruit, giving clear, firm pieces. Boiling hard can break the tomatoes apart and make the syrup cloudy.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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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