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Tomato Preserves

Preserved tomatoes sweetened with sugar and lemon, cooked until syrupy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and lemon work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 623 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Weigh the desired amount of tomatoes.

  2. Wash and prick the tomatoes with a needle to prevent bursting.

  3. Add an equal weight of sugar to the tomatoes and let them stand overnight.

  4. The next morning, add enough water to cover the tomatoes.

Cook

  1. Boil slowly until the fruit is clear and the syrup is almost jellied.

  2. Before removing from heat, add one sliced lemon for each pound of tomatoes.

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. Plum + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

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

Tomatoes
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and clear, forming the bulk of the preserve.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and builds the thick syrup that preserves them.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the syrup set.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until the syrup is almost jellied. Cooking gently lets the tomatoes clear and the syrup thicken gradually. Boiling too hard can break the fruit apart and scorch the sugar before the syrup reaches a jelly-like consistency.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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