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Spiced Tomatoes
Five pounds tomatoes, three and one-half pounds sugar, one pint vinegar, one-half ounce ground cinnamon, one-half ounce ground cloves; remove the skin from the tomatoes and boil alone until very soft, then strain, add the spices and boil three hours.
This is a spiced tomato butter — a sweet-sour preserve meant to go on the supper table beside cold meat, not a side dish of stewed tomatoes. The written method leaves out when the sugar goes in, and the three-hour boil assumes a wide, heavy pan over a slow fire.
- The missing stepSugar appears in the ingredient list but never in the instructions. Add it with the spices, after straining, and stir until dissolved before the long boil begins; going in earlier makes scorching more likely while the tomatoes are still watery.
- Weights, not volumesFive pounds of tomatoes is roughly 12-15 medium ones. Three and a half pounds of sugar is about 8 cups — a sugar-to-fruit ratio of roughly 2:3 by weight, which is what makes this a preserve rather than a sauce. A pint is 2 cups of vinegar; cider vinegar, at about 5 percent acidity, was the kind most commonly to hand.
- Half an ounce of ground spiceThat is about 14 g each of cinnamon and cloves, or roughly 2 tablespoons apiece. Ground spice may well have been fresher, or staler, than a modern jar; either way this is a heavy hand by current taste, and a tablespoon of cloves is closer to contemporary palates.
- Skinning and strainingBlanch 30 seconds in boiling water and the skins slip off. The later straining is there to catch seeds and stray pulp — a food mill or coarse sieve does it faster than pushing through cloth.
- Three hours on modern heatThe long boil is a reduction, not a rule. In a wide heavy-bottomed pot over low heat, stirring often as it thickens, it will take two to three hours to reach a spreadable, jam-like consistency. In a thin pan it will catch and taste burnt well before then.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a large batch; the sugar alone accounts for several cups, so expect something closer to 7 or 8 cups finished. The recipe gives no canning directions at all, and none should be improvised: refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process if you want it shelf-stable.
- ServingServe cool or at room temperature with cold ham, tongue, roast fowl or sharp cheese. It is sweet enough to work on buttered toast as well.
Sweet spiced tomato preserves were common in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, appearing under names like tomato butter, tomato marmalade and spiced tomatoes, and they sit in the awkward middle ground the tomato occupied at the time — treated sometimes as a vegetable, sometimes as a fruit to be sugared down like a plum. The vinegar-sugar-clove-cinnamon combination is the same one behind spiced peaches, pickled pears and the whole family of "sweet pickles" kept on hand to cut through cold meat. Making it also solved a seasonal problem, since a heavy tomato crop had to be dealt with quickly and sugar was the surest way to hold it.