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Dessert

Tomato Figs

Tomato figs are tomatoes sweetened with sugar, cooked, dried, and packed with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,667 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Tomato Figs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald tomatoes and remove their skins.

Cook and dry

  1. Cook the tomatoes over medium heat in their own juice until the sugar penetrates and they are clarified.

  2. Spread the cooked tomatoes on dishes, flatten them, and dry them in the sun.

  3. Occasionally sprinkle a small quantity of syrup over the tomatoes while drying.

Pack and store

  1. Pack the dried tomatoes in boxes, treating each layer with powdered sugar.

  2. Concentrate the remaining syrup and bottle it for use.

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. Sugar + tomatotop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the main body of the dish, becoming translucent and chewy as they cook and dry.
Sugar
Penetrates the tomatoes, sweetens them, and helps preserve them as moisture is drawn out.

The step that matters

Cooking the tomatoes in their own juice until clarified. Sugar must penetrate the tomato flesh gradually over moderate heat. Cooking too hard can break the tomatoes down before the sugar has time to draw out water, leaving a mushy texture instead of a clear, firm one.

“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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