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Dessert

Tomato Jam, Yellow, American

A jam made from yellow tomatoes, sugar, and lemon, boiled after soaking.

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 Jam, Yellow, American

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Peel the ripe, thin-skinned tomatoes carefully and place them in single layers on dishes.

  2. Sprinkle pure cane sugar, roughly broken up, over the tomatoes.

Make the syrup

  1. After 24 to 36 hours, pour off the syrup and boil it.

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

Yellow tomatoes
Make up the bulk of the jam and supply most of its flesh, juice and flavour.
Lump sugar
Draws juice out of the tomatoes, sweetens the jam and helps preserve it.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and supports the jam setting.

The step that matters

Boiling the pour-off syrup. Boiling concentrates the sugar and evaporates water from the juice. This drives off moisture so the jam thickens and sets, and a higher sugar concentration helps it keep.

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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