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Dessert

Tomato Preserves

A sweet tomato preserve made by cooking tomatoes with sugar until thick.

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 Preserves

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin from the tomatoes using a sharp knife.

  2. Pour enough water into a preserving kettle to cover the bottom by 1 inch.

Cook

  1. Add the tomatoes to the kettle.

  2. Add an equal amount of sugar.

  3. Cook slowly for several hours until the syrup is thick and the preserves are a rich brown.

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 preserves and release juice that cooks down into the syrup.
Sugar
Thickens the syrup and, during long cooking, helps the preserves darken to a rich brown.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for several hours. As water evaporates, the syrup concentrates and thickens, and the sugar slowly caramelizes to brown. Gentle heat lets this happen evenly and reduces the risk of scorching the sugar before the preserves are thick.

“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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