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Dessert

Tomato Figs

Preserved tomatoes soaked in sugar syrup, dried in sun, and packed in wooden boxes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 Figs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Pour boiling water over the tomatoes to remove the skins.

  2. Weigh the tomatoes and place them in a stone jar with an equal weight of sugar.

  3. Let them stand for two days.

Make the syrup

  1. Pour off the syrup, boil, and skim until no scum rises.

  2. Pour the syrup back over the tomatoes and let them stand for another two days.

  3. Boil and skim again.

  4. After a third boiling and skimming, let them sit in their syrup until drying weather.

Dry and pack

  1. Place the tomatoes on earthen plates or dishes and put them in the sun to dry for about a week.

  2. Pack the dried tomatoes in small wooden boxes with fine white sugar between each layer.

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 main body of the fruit, which softens in syrup and dries into a chewy texture.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and preserves them, giving the dried result its sweetness.

The step that matters

Skimming the boiled syrup. Repeated boiling and skimming removes scum and impurities from the syrup, which helps keep the sugar-preserved tomatoes clean and stable during the long soak.

“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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