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Tomato Figs

A preserved tomato dish made by cooking tomatoes with sugar, drying, and layering with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and sugar 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 and cook

  1. Scald the tomatoes and remove their skins.

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

Dry and pack

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

  2. Occasionally sprinkle a small amount of syrup over the tomatoes while drying.

  3. Pack the dried tomatoes in boxes, layering with powdered sugar.

  4. Concentrate the remaining syrup and bottle it for later 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. Tomato + sugartop 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 bulk of the dish and soften and concentrate in the cooking syrup as they dry.
Sugar
Sweetens the tomatoes and draws out moisture, helping them dry into a preserved, chewy texture.

The step that matters

Cooking the tomatoes until the sugar penetrates. If the sugar has not fully penetrated the tomatoes, they keep more water inside. That moisture slows drying and makes the finished tomatoes more likely to spoil, so the cook must keep them over medium heat until the syrup has soaked in.

“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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