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Toiviato Preserves

A preserve made by boiling tomatoes with sugar, optionally flavored with ginger or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Toiviato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes, then remove the seeds.

  2. Weigh the tomatoes and add an equal amount of sugar.

  3. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Cook

  1. Pour off the juice into a preserving kettle and boil until thick.

  2. Add the tomatoes and boil gently until they look transparent.

  3. Optionally, add a little root ginger or sliced lemon.

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

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

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

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

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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and fruit flesh that becomes the preserve.
Sugar
Draws moisture out of the tomatoes and acts as a preservative while setting the texture.

The step that matters

Boil the tomatoes until they look transparent. Boiling gently lets sugar slowly penetrate the tomato tissue, so the fruit turns clear and holds its shape. Boiling too hard can break the pieces apart and leave the preserve cloudy or mushy.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sugar, lemon):

  1. Corianderfits better
  2. Basilfits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, 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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