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Dessert

Yellow Tomato Marmalade

A preserve made from tomato insides, lemon, ginger, and sugar, boiled into a marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Yellow Tomato Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Squeeze the insides out of the tomatoes.

  2. Boil the tomato insides for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the boiled insides over the remaining tomato parts.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add 1 lb. of sugar to 1 pint of the strained tomatoes.

  2. Boil for one hour.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Tomato + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 bulk, pulp and body of the marmalade.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken and preserve the marmalade as water evaporates.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin, which helps the marmalade set.
Ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour.

The step that matters

Boil for one hour. A sustained boil with the sugar concentrates the mixture and lets the pectin and acid set it. Too short a boil leaves it runny, while too much heat or stirring can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, ginger, sugar. 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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