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Dessert

Tomato Preserves

A preserved tomato mixture sweetened with sugar and lemon, boiled into a thick syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the ripe tomatoes.

  2. Sprinkle the tomatoes with an equal weight of sugar and let them sit overnight.

Make the preserves

  1. In the morning, pour off the liquid and boil it until it becomes a thick syrup.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the syrup and boil until they look clear and are well cooked.

  3. Slice thin lemons and add 1 lemon for each pound of tomatoes.

  4. Put the mixture in a jar and cover it tightly once it cools.

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. Tomato + sugartop 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve and its fruity flavor and body.
Sugar
Draws out tomato liquid and, once boiled, thickens into syrup and preserves the fruit.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boiling the tomatoes in the syrup until clear. The tomatoes must cook long enough for the syrup to penetrate and the sugar concentration to rise, which helps the fruit keep its shape and preserves it safely. Stopping too early leaves the preserve runny and less stable.

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.

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