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Dessert

Ripe Tomato Preserves

A sweet and tart preserve made from ripe tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice.

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 ↓

Ripe Tomato Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Macerate

  1. Combine tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice in a bowl and let stand overnight.

Cook the syrup and fruit

  1. Drain off the syrup and boil it, skimming well.

  2. Add the tomatoes to the syrup and boil gently for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove the fruit with a skimmer and spread it on dishes.

  4. Boil the syrup down until it thickens, adding lemon juice just before removing from heat.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the fruit into jars and fill with hot syrup; seal when cold.

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

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the preserve and their own flavour and texture once cooked.
Sugar
Draws water out of the tomatoes and syrups them, giving sweetness and a thick, preserved set.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the preserve set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup down until it thickens. Sugar concentration must be high enough to thicken the syrup and preserve the fruit. Under-cooked syrup stays thin and can spoil, while over-boiling makes it too stiff.

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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