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Preserve

Green Tomato Preserve

A preserve made from green tomatoes, sugar, and lemon, cooked until tender and transparent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,592 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Green Tomato Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemon

  1. Taste the white part of the lemon to ensure it is not bitter.

  2. If bitter, use the yellow rind, grated or shaved thin, and the juice instead.

Cook the preserve

  1. Combine the sugar with just enough water to dissolve it.

  2. Add the tomatoes and lemon to the sugar mixture.

  3. Cook gently until the tomatoes are tender and transparent.

  4. Cut the tomatoes in half, then quarter the halves.

Store

  1. Store in small jars for best results.

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

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Form the body of the preserve and turn tender and translucent as they cook in the syrup.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, in a dissolved syrup at high concentration, helps preserve it and firm its texture.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balances the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Taste the white part of the lemon first. The white pith of a lemon can be bitter, and that bitterness carries into the whole preserve once it cooks with the sugar. Tasting first lets you switch to the yellow rind and juice, which avoids a bitter result.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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