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Spiced Tomatoes

A pickled tomato recipe with vinegar, spices, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Prick the tomatoes two or three times with a fork.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let stand overnight.

  3. Pack the tomatoes in a glass jar.

Make the spiced vinegar

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar, allspice, cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, and sugar.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and pour it over the tomatoes.

Cover and cool

  1. Once cooled, cover the jar with strong paper.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pear + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Red and yellow pear-shaped tomatoes
Provide the main body and juice that the spiced vinegar soaks into.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that preserves the tomatoes and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the vinegar and rounds out the spice flavors.
Allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic flavor to the pickling liquid.
Cloves
Contributes strong, warm aroma to the pickling liquid.
Cinnamon
Contributes sweet, woody aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling spiced vinegar over the tomatoes. Boiling extracts the flavor from the whole spices and dissolves the sugar into the vinegar. Pouring it hot helps the liquid penetrate the pricked tomatoes, while the acid keeps them preserved.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, vinegar, allspice, clove, pepper, cinnamon, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, vinegar, allspice, clove, pepper, cinnamon, sugar. 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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