Skip to main content
Dessert

Tomato Preserve

A sweet tomato preserve made with sugar, tomatoes, water, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Tomato Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the tomatoes by dipping them in boiling water.

  2. Slice the tomatoes thick.

  3. Drain the tomato juice.

  4. Slice the lemons.

  5. Boil the lemons in water until tender.

  6. Drain the lemons.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine the sugar and water in a pot to make a syrup.

  2. Boil the syrup until thick.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the tomatoes and lemons to the syrup gradually.

  2. Cook until clear and rich.

  3. Place the mixture on a flat dish to drain.

  4. Transfer to jars and cover with syrup.

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. Sugar + tomatotop 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

Sugar
Forms the thick syrup that preserves the fruit and gives it sweetness.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body of the preserve and its fruit flavor.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavor.

The step that matters

Cook until clear and rich. Sugar must be concentrated enough to preserve the fruit. Undercooking leaves the syrup thin and the preserve prone to spoiling, while overcooking can make it hard and sticky.

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.

More tomato preserve recipes

Green 9Yellow 5 See all 30 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes