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Tomato Preserves

A sweetened tomato preserve made with sugar and lemon, boiled until smooth and thick.

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 fruit

  1. Peel the ripe tomatoes and remove all the seeds.

  2. Boil the lemons until soft, then pound them finely and remove the seeds from the lemons.

Cook the preserves

  1. Place the tomatoes in a preserving kettle and add ½ pound of sugar for each pound of prepared tomatoes.

  2. Add the pounded lemons to the tomatoes.

  3. Boil the mixture slowly.

  4. Mash the mixture until smooth.

  5. Transfer the smooth, thick mixture into jars.

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 fresh tomato flavour and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken and keep as the mixture cooks down.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma, and their pectin helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture slowly. Slow boiling lets water evaporate gradually so the preserve thickens without scorching on the bottom of the kettle. Sugar and sugary mixtures can burn quickly if heated too hard.

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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