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Preserve

Green Tomato Preserves

A preserve made from green tomatoes, sugar, and lemon, cooked until transparent.

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 ↓

Green Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Macerate

  1. Cut each tomato in half and mix with sugar.

  2. Let stand overnight.

Cook the preserves

  1. Drain off the juice and boil it to make a syrup.

  2. Add the tomatoes and sliced lemons to the syrup and cook until transparent, about 2 hours.

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

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

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 bulk of the preserve and become tender and translucent as they cook in syrup.
Sugar
Draws moisture out of the tomatoes to form a syrup and sweetens and preserves the fruit.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavor and helps balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cook until transparent. Cooking the tomatoes slowly in the syrup lets sugar gradually replace water in the fruit, so it turns translucent and firm rather than watery or falling apart. Stopping too early leaves the preserve thin and cloudy.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Tomatothe 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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