Skip to main content
Dessert

Tomato Jelly

A gelatin set tomato preserve with celery and mayonnaise filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Tomato Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Boil the tomatoes, cloves, bay leaf, onion, thyme, salt, sugar, and pepper until the tomatoes are soft.

  2. Soak the gelatin in ½ cup of water until soft, then add it to the tomato mixture and stir until dissolved.

  3. Strain the mixture and pour it into a ring-shaped mold to set.

Serve

  1. Once set, fill the center with chopped celery mixed with mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Surround the ring with a wreath of lettuce or serve as a solid piece surrounded by celery and lettuce.

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 + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main flavor and body of the jelly base.
Gelatin
Sets the tomato liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatin fully. Gelatin must be softened in water and then stirred into the hot mixture until completely dissolved. Undissolved granules leave gritty spots and uneven setting, so the jelly may not hold its shape evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, clove, thyme, sugar, pepper, gelatin):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, thyme, sugar, pepper, gelatin. 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.

More tomato jelly recipes

Salad 39 See all 108 →

You might also like

Clove CakeClove Cake53 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes