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Tomato Preserves
Scald and peel carefully small perfectly-formed tomatoes, not too ripe (yellow pear-shaped are best), prick with a needle to prevent bursting, add an equal amount of sugar by weight, let lie over night, then pour off all juice into a preserving-kettle, and boil until it is a thick syrup, clarifying with white of an egg; add tomatoes and boil carefully until they look transparent. A piece or two of root-ginger, or one lemon to a pound of fruit sliced thin and cooked with the fruit, may be added.
A straightforward whole-fruit preserve: the sugar draws out juice overnight, the juice is reduced to syrup, and the fruit is only then simmered so it stays whole. A few of the instructions assume equipment and habits that have gone.
- The hinge: cook the syrup firstBoiling the tomatoes in thin syrup collapses them. Reduce the drained juice to a syrup that sheets off the spoon, then add the fruit and hold it at a bare simmer until it turns translucent, judging by eye rather than by the clock.
- Yellow pear tomatoesStill grown, usually as a heirloom cherry type, and worth seeking out for this because the flesh is firm and holds its shape once peeled. Any firm cherry or small paste tomato works; avoid large slicers, which shed too much water and fall apart.
- Not too ripeRead this as firm and just barely coloured. Riper tomatoes have softened and will tend to slump in the syrup.
- Sugar by weightEqual weights of fruit and sugar — around 2 lb of each is a manageable batch. The ratio is not a matter of taste: it is what draws the juice out overnight and gives the syrup its body.
- Clarifying with white of an eggA nineteenth-century step for unrefined sugar, which carried scum and sediment. Whisked white was stirred into the cool syrup and the coagulated raft skimmed off as it heated. Modern granulated sugar needs none of it; skim any foam and move on.
- Preserving-kettleA wide, shallow pan of the period, usually brass, copper or lined ironware. Use the widest heavy-bottomed non-reactive pan you have — a preserving pan or a large stainless sauté pan. Depth works against you here; evaporation is the point.
- Root-ginger and lemonRoot ginger means a piece of fresh rhizome, bruised and fished out at the end, not ground. One thinly sliced lemon per pound of fruit is a lot of lemon by modern palates; half that is plenty, and it also usefully acidifies a low-acid fruit.
- Keeping itThe recipe gives no sealing instructions at all. Tomatoes are low in acid, so do not treat this as shelf-stable: refrigerate it and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested canning process for tomato preserves if you want jars for the cupboard.
- YieldEqual weights of fruit and sugar make a good deal of preserve; expect several half-pint jars from a 2 lb batch. Serve it as you would a fig or quince preserve — with cheese, cold meat, or on buttered toast.
Tomato preserves belong to the long stretch of the nineteenth century when the tomato was still treated as much like a fruit as a vegetable, and small yellow pear-shaped varieties were grown in kitchen gardens specifically for sweetmeats and pickles. The book that began as The Buckeye Cook-Book, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and appeared in 1877 under the title Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping from a Minneapolis publisher, files it among the preserves, all of them built on the same one-to-one sugar ratio that was the era's standard insurance against spoilage. The egg-white clarification is the clearest period marker: household sugar then was often only partly refined, and the same trick appears in confectionery and jelly-making manuals of the day. Ginger and lemon are the usual companions for a fruit with little acid and a mild flavour of its own, and versions of the recipe circulated widely enough in American community cookbooks that no single author can be credited with it.