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Dessert

Pineapple and Tomato Jam

A jam made from pineapple, tomatoes, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and tomato work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pineapple and Tomato Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and cut up the pineapples.

  2. Skin the tomatoes by plunging them in boiling water, then in cold water, and rubbing off the skins.

Cook the jam

  1. Boil the fruit together gently until the pineapple is soft.

  2. Add 1 lb of sugar for every 1 lb of the mixture and boil again for 30 minutes or longer.

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. Pineapple + tomatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together306 recipes

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

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapples
Provide the main fruit flavour and, once cooked soft, body to the jam.
Tomatoes
Add bulk, moisture and a tart acidity that balances the sweetness of the pineapple.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, as it boils down, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boiling with the sugar. Sugar must be added to the measured fruit mixture and boiled long enough to concentrate it. Too little boiling leaves the jam runny, since sugar and reduction together thicken the fruit and help it set.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, 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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