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Dessert

Green Tomato Preserve

A preserve made from green tomatoes, sugar, ginger, mace, and lemon, boiled until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon 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 ↓

Green Tomato Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Pierce each tomato with a fork.

Make the syrup and cook the tomatoes

  1. Make a syrup by combining sugar with water and boiling until dissolved.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the syrup and boil until they become clear.

  3. Remove the tomatoes and place them on dishes to cool.

Finish and store

  1. Boil the syrup until thick, then pour it over the tomatoes in a jar.

  2. Once cooled, seal the jar for storage.

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. Ginger + lemontop 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 + macetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger 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

Small green tomatoes
Provide the main body of the preserve and absorb the syrup as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled into syrup, thickens it and helps preserve the fruit.
Ginger root
Adds a warm, spicy aroma that complements the tomatoes.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the preserve.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the tomatoes until they become clear. Tomatoes must be cooked gently in syrup long enough for sugar to replace water in the fruit. Boiling too hard can break the tomatoes apart, while stopping too early leaves them opaque and less preserved.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, ginger, 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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