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Tomato Preserve

A preserved tomato mixture thickened into syrup with sugar and clarified with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully.

  2. Prick each tomato with a needle to prevent bursting.

  3. Weigh the tomatoes and add an equal weight of sugar.

  4. Let the mixture sit overnight.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Pour off the juice into a preserving kettle and boil until it thickens into a syrup, clarifying with the egg white.

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

  3. Optionally, add sliced ginger root or lemon to enhance flavor.

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. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Tomato + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pear + tomatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 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 pear-shaped tomatoes
Provide the fruit that is cooked until transparent and set in the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and draws juice out of the tomatoes, then thickens it into syrup.
Egg white
Binds to impurities as it heats, clarifying the syrup so it stays clear.

The step that matters

Boiling the tomatoes in the syrup. Boil gently until the tomatoes look transparent. Too little cooking leaves them opaque and watery, while overcooking breaks them down. Sugar concentration in the syrup is what firms the fruit and preserves it.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Corianderfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, tomato, sugar, egg. 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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