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Tomato Preserves

A preserved tomato mixture sweetened with sugar and clarified with egg white, optionally flavored with ginger or lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald and peel the tomatoes carefully.

  2. Prick the end of each tomato with a knife and gently squeeze out the seeds and water.

  3. Weigh the tomatoes and add an equal amount of sugar by weight.

  4. Let the mixture sit overnight.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Pour off all juice into a preserving kettle and boil until it becomes a thick syrup, clarifying with the white of an egg.

  2. Add the tomatoes and boil carefully until they look transparent.

  3. Optionally, add a piece or two of root ginger or one thinly sliced lemon for every pound of fruit.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pear + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Pear + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together942 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the fruit that becomes translucent and tender as they cook in syrup.
Sugar
Draws out moisture and, as it thickens, preserves the tomatoes and gives sweetness.
White of an egg
Binds impurities that rise to the surface so the syrup can be skimmed clear.

The step that matters

Boiling the tomatoes in the syrup. Boil carefully so the tomatoes keep their shape. Vigorous boiling can break the skins and fruit apart, while gentle cooking lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pear, sugar, egg, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Corianderfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pear, sugar, egg, 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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