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Green Tomato Preserve
Take ten pounds of green tomatoes sliced thin, six lemons sliced, picking out all the seeds.
Do not peel the lemons. Add one cup of water and a small box of preserved ginger and let boil one half hour. Add eight pounds of sugar; let all boil slowly on back of stove until syrup is thick, stirring often. A small handful of dry ginger root may be used in place of the preserved ginger. Let the dry ginger-root stand overnight in cold water, then slice and add to the tomatoes.
A long, slow ginger-and-lemon preserve of the sort meant to use up the last of the vine before frost. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are large and the book assumes you know how a preserve is finished and sealed.
- Scale and yieldTen pounds of tomatoes plus eight pounds of sugar fills a very large preserving pan and yields roughly 12-14 pints. Halving or quartering the recipe works without adjustment, and a quarter batch finishes noticeably faster.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range the back plate was the coolest spot, used for hours-long reduction. On a modern hob this means the lowest simmer that still moves the syrup, in the widest heavy pan you own. Expect 1.5 to 2.5 hours after the sugar goes in.
- When the syrup is thickThe original gives no test. Take it to 220F (about 8F above the boiling point of water where you live), or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. The tomato slices should be translucent and suspended, not floating in loose liquid.
- Preserved gingerA "small box" of preserved ginger meant stem ginger in heavy syrup, an imported item often sold in glazed stoneware jars from Canton; box and jar sizes varied, so treat the quantity as approximate. Around 8 oz of drained stem ginger in syrup, sliced, works for this batch. Crystallised ginger works but adds more sugar.
- The dry root alternativeDried whole ginger root, soaked overnight and sliced, gives a sharper and less sweet result. A "small handful" is imprecise; an ounce or two of dried root is a reasonable reading. Powdered ground ginger is not a substitute here; it clouds the syrup and turns muddy over a long boil.
- The lemonsThe recipe is explicit that the peel stays on; rind and pith carry pectin and the fruit its acid, which help the set and balance the sugar, though the peel is also there for flavour. Slice them thin and remove every seed as directed, or the finished jars will taste bitter.
- StirringAt this sugar concentration the bottom scorches quickly once the syrup thickens, and scorched sugar taints the whole batch. Stir up from the base every few minutes through the last half hour.
- Sealing and storageThe book stops at the thickening and leaves the sealing to a general chapter. Ladle boiling hot into clean hot jars and either refrigerate and eat within a couple of months, or process in a boiling water bath following current tested times for your jar size. Tomatoes sit on the borderline of the acid range used for water-bath canning, so do not reduce the lemons if you intend to shelf-store.
Green tomato preserves belong to the frugal end of the American preserving calendar: the fruit that would never ripen before frost, sliced thin and carried by sugar, lemon and ginger into something that reads as a sweetmeat rather than a vegetable. Nineteenth-century cookbooks treated the tomato freely as a fruit for preserving, and green tomato "figs" and marmalades appear alongside quince and citron well before the 1870s. The preserved ginger called for here was an imported luxury, arriving in glazed stoneware jars from Canton and sold by the box in grocers' shops, and the recipe also gives a dried-root fallback.