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Tomato Sauce (Take any quantity of ripe)
Take any quantity of ripe tomatoes, put them into an earthen jar, and place them, covered over, in a hot oven till perfectly soft; then rub them through a fine sieve, to keep out the seeds and skins. To every quart of juice add a clove of garlic, or, if the flavor is preferred, two shallots, bruised, a quarter of an ounce of ginger, the same quantity of black pepper, and a tablespoonful of salt; boil for about twenty minutes, and bottle, cork down, and wax it at once. If liked, the juice of two lemons may be added to the above before boiling.
This is a shelf-stable bottled tomato sauce with no heat processing, no measured acidification and no refrigeration. It cannot be made safely by these directions, and the reasons are worth understanding.
- Corked and waxed, not processedThe sauce is boiled twenty minutes, poured hot into bottles, corked and sealed with wax. Nothing sterilises the sealed container afterwards, and a cork under wax is not an airtight, vacuum seal. This produces an oxygen-poor, room-temperature environment — precisely the conditions Clostridium botulinum spores survive and grow in.
- Tomatoes are not reliably acidic enoughBotulism is prevented in canned tomatoes by holding the pH at or below 4.6, which modern practice achieves with a measured addition of bottled lemon juice or citric acid per jar. Here lemon juice is optional and unmeasured, and some tomatoes — particularly overripe fruit and certain varieties — sit at or above that threshold on their own.
- Garlic, shallot and ginger make it worseThe aromatics are low-acid ingredients going into the juice before boiling, and they carry soil-borne spores into the bottle. Garlic in particular is a known vehicle for botulism when held in anaerobic conditions at room temperature.
- Twenty minutes of boiling does not steriliseBoiling destroys the toxin and the vegetative bacteria but not the spores, which need either a pressure canner or a genuinely acid environment to be controlled. A boiled-then-bottled sauce is safe only until the spores that survived begin to germinate in the sealed bottle.
- The salt is a seasoning, not a preservativeA tablespoon of salt per quart is roughly 2 percent by weight — enough to taste, nowhere near enough to inhibit spore growth. Nothing else in the formula preserves anything.
- Reading the originalA quart of juice is 32 fl oz by the US measure, 40 by the imperial; a quarter of an ounce of ginger or pepper is about 7 g. The earthen jar in a hot oven is simply a covered vessel for collapsing the fruit without scorching.
- If you want this sauceUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify the acidification and the processing method, or make it fresh and keep it in the refrigerator for a few days.
Nineteenth-century "tomato sauce" of this kind is closer to a bottled ketchup or store sauce than to anything poured over pasta: a strained, spiced, keeping liquid to be shaken over meat and fish, of a piece with the mushroom, walnut and anchovy sauces that filled the same shelf. The oven-softening of whole fruit in a covered earthen jar is an older technique that survived into print. Recipes like this one appear in household books through the whole period of home bottling that preceded any general understanding of botulism 1890s, and reliable domestic guidance on acidifying tomatoes is a twentieth-century development, which is why such a book can call for a cork and a coat of wax in perfect good faith.