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Dessert

Green Tomato Preserves

Preserves made from small green tomatoes cooked in a sugar, mace, ginger, and lemon juice syrup.

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 ↓

Green Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Prick the tomatoes well with a large needle or fork.

Make the syrup and cook the tomatoes

  1. In a pot, combine sugar, mace, sliced ginger, and lemon juice to make a syrup.

  2. When the syrup begins to thicken, add the tomatoes.

  3. Boil the tomatoes until they are clear.

  4. Carefully remove the tomatoes and place them on dishes.

  5. Continue boiling the syrup until it is quite thick.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the fruit into well-heated jars.

  2. Pour the boiling syrup over the fruit in the jars.

  3. Seal the jars immediately.

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

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

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

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

  4. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

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

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

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve and the fruit texture that holds up during long boiling.
Sugar
Forms the thick syrup that sweetens the fruit and preserves it by drawing out moisture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the syrup set.
Sliced ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Mace
Adds a delicate warm aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Continue boiling the syrup until it is quite thick. Sugar must reach a high enough concentration to thicken and preserve the fruit. Undercooked syrup stays thin and can let the preserve spoil, while overcooking can make it stiff and candy-like.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sugar, ginger, lemon):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, ginger, 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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