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Tomato Preserves

A sweet tomato preserve made by boiling tomatoes with sugar and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and ginger work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 452 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Scald the tomatoes and peel them carefully.

  2. Prick each tomato with a needle to prevent bursting.

  3. Weigh the tomatoes.

  4. Use the same weight in sugar.

  5. Let them sit overnight.

Make the syrup

  1. Pour off the juice into a preserve kettle.

  2. Boil until thick like syrup, clarifying with the egg white.

  3. Add the tomatoes.

  4. Slice ginger root or lemon and cook it with the fruit.

  5. Boil until the tomatoes look transparent.

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

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

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

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

  3. Pear + tomatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Small, pear-shaped tomatoes
Provide the fruit that becomes the preserve, holding their shape when pricked and cooked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it dissolves into the juice, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Egg white
Clarifies the boiling syrup, binding impurities so they can be skimmed off for a clear result.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick, then add the tomatoes. Sugar must be concentrated enough to thicken the syrup and draw water out of the fruit. If the syrup is not boiled down far enough, the preserve stays thin and spoils more easily.

Swap the ginger

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

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

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