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Dessert

Green Tomato Preserves

Preserves made from small green tomatoes, sugar, water, and lemon, boiled for three hours.

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

Green Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a clarified syrup by combining equal weights of sugar and tomatoes with enough cold water to cover the tomatoes.

  2. Slice the lemon and add it to the syrup.

Cook and preserve

  1. Gently boil the tomatoes in the syrup for three hours.

  2. Transfer the tomatoes into jars and secure them tightly.

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

Green tomatoes
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and holds its shape in the sugar syrup.
White sugar
Sweetens the preserves and thickens the syrup, helping preserve the fruit.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Gently boil the tomatoes in the syrup. A gentle simmer keeps the tomatoes whole and tender while the sugar slowly penetrates the fruit. A hard, rapid boil can break the tomatoes apart and make the syrup scorch or over-thicken.

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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