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Tomato Figs
Scald and skin pear-shaped (or any small-sized) tomatoes, and to eight pounds of them add three pounds brown sugar; cook without water until the sugar penetrates and they have a clear appearance, take out, spread on dishes, and dry in the sun, sprinkling on a little syrup while drying; pack in jars or boxes, in layers with powdered sugar between. Thus put up they will keep for any length of time, and are nearly equal to figs. Peaches may be preserved in the same way. -Mrs. John Samuels, Covington, Ky.
A candied-fruit preserve rather than a jam: the tomatoes are cooked in sugar until translucent, then dried until leathery. The hinge is drying them far enough that no soft, wet centers remain.
- Scale it downEight pounds of tomatoes to three pounds of sugar is a full harvest batch. The 8:3 ratio holds at any size; two pounds of tomatoes with three-quarters of a pound of sugar is a manageable trial and yields roughly a pint jar of finished "figs."
- Which tomatoes"Pear-shaped" means the small yellow or red pear varieties still sold at markets; Roma-type plums or cherry tomatoes work. Small, meaty, low-juice fruit is the point, since watery tomatoes collapse in the syrup.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less refined than modern brown and varied a good deal in colour and molasses content from batch to batch, so there is no exact modern equivalent. Light brown sugar gives a milder result; dark brown will dominate the flavor.
- Cook without waterThere is no liquid at the start, so use a heavy pan over low heat and let the tomatoes release their own juice before raising the temperature. Stir gently and infrequently, or the fruit breaks up. Expect 45 minutes to over an hour before they turn clear.
- DryingSun-drying takes several days in hot, dry, breezy weather and needs covering against insects, plus bringing indoors overnight so dew does not rewet the fruit. A dehydrator at 135-140F, or an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped, does the same job in 8-12 hours with less risk.
- Dry enoughThe finished pieces should be pliable and tacky like a dried fig, with no soft wet pockets. Underdried fruit packed in a jar molds, and the sugar layers will not save it. Cut one open before packing.
- Storage"Keep for any length of time" assumed a cool dry pantry and thorough drying. Powdered sugar between layers keeps pieces from fusing; store in a sealed jar and check for surface mold in the first week or two.
- ServingThese are a sweetmeat, eaten from the dish like candied fruit, or chopped into cakes and puddings where you would use dried figs or dates.
Tomato figs appear in American cookbooks from the 1830s onward and were something of a minor craze: in those earlier decades the tomato was still winning acceptance as a food rather than a curiosity, and treating it as fruit made a rhetorical as much as a culinary point. Recipes often end, as this one does, with the claim that the result is "nearly equal to figs" — figs being an imported dried good in the Ohio Valley, while tomatoes were something any garden produced by the bushel. Buckeye Cookery (1877) is generally said to have collected contributions by name and town, and Mrs. Samuels of Covington, Kentucky, was passing along a thrift technique as much as a confection: sugar, sun, and a glut of small tomatoes turned into something that would sit in a box through winter.