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Figs of Tomatoes
Pour boiling water over the tomatoes in order to remove the skins; then weigh them and place them in a stone jar, with as much sugar as you have tomatoes, and let them stand two days. Pour off the syrup and boil and skim it until no scum rises. Then pour it over the tomatoes, and let them stand two days, as before, then boil and skim again. After a third time they are fit to dry, if the weather is good; if not, let them stand in the syrup until drying weather. Then place on large earthen plates or dishes, and put them in the sun to dry, which will take about a week, after which, pack them down in small wooden boxes, with fine white sugar between each layer. Tomatoes prepared in this manner will keep for years.
This is candied fruit, not a canned preserve: the tomatoes are drawn in a heavy syrup over the course of a week or more, then dried until leathery and packed in sugar. Nothing about it is difficult, but the schedule is long and the drying stage is where it succeeds or fails.
- Use small, dense tomatoesNineteenth-century "tomato fig" recipes commonly specified small yellow pear or plum varieties, which hold their shape through the repeated syruping. Modern beefsteak or slicing tomatoes are watery and tend to collapse into pulp; cherry, grape or Roma types work better.
- Sugar is by weight, not volume"As much sugar as you have tomatoes" means equal weight, so 2 lb sugar to 2 lb peeled tomatoes. That ratio is what makes the finished fruit keep, and cutting it back will give you something that moulds instead.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. Any non-reactive vessel does the same job: glass, stainless steel or a food-safe plastic tub. Avoid bare aluminium or unlined copper, which the acid will pick up over the several days of standing.
- Draw, don't cookThe point of the two-day rests is osmosis, not heat. Only the drained syrup is boiled; the tomatoes stay cool in the jar and gradually take up sugar as the syrup thickens with each cycle. Boiling the fruit itself turns it to jam.
- SkimmingThe scum is coagulated protein and impurities from the sugar and fruit. Boil the syrup gently and lift the foam off as it forms; "until no scum rises" is usually a few minutes at a simmer, and it keeps the finished syrup clear.
- "Drying weather"Hot, dry, breezy days with low humidity, which is why the recipe permits an indefinite wait in the syrup. Outdoors you must cover the plates with fine mesh against insects and bring them in each evening so they do not take up night dew.
- A dehydrator insteadA dehydrator at around 135F, or an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, will do in a matter of hours what the sun took a week over. Dry until the surface is tacky-leathery and no syrup weeps when pressed.
- Packing and storageFine sugar between the layers keeps the pieces from fusing and absorbs any surface moisture. The wooden boxes can be any airtight container; keep it cool and dark, and check the first few weeks for stickiness, which means the fruit needed longer drying.
- YieldThe finished figs shrink considerably from the weight of fresh fruit, though the sugar taken up offsets some of the water lost. They are eaten as confectionery, with cheese, or chopped into cakes and puddings in place of dried figs.
Recipes for "tomato figs" ran through American cookbooks and agricultural papers in the mid-nineteenth century, at a point when the tomato was still being argued about as much as eaten, and treating it as a sweet preserve was one way of making the case for it. The name is descriptive rather than botanical: candied and sun-dried, the small varieties shrink to something with the chew, sweetness and pale bloom of a dried fig, and they were recommended precisely as a domestic substitute for imported figs, which were expensive and came a long way. The method is pure sugar preservation — repeated boilings of the syrup rather than the fruit, so that water leaves the tomato and sugar takes its place — and the boast that they "will keep for years" is the ordinary claim made for any well-candied fruit in the era before reliable home canning.