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Tomato Figs
Yellow, pear-shaped tomatoes are the best for this sweetmeat, but any small tomatoes will answer. Dip them, in a wire basket, into boiling water, let stand a minute, then take them from the water and remove the skins. To five pounds of tomatoes, allow two pounds of brown sugar. Sprinkle some of the sugar in a broad agate dish, dispose a layer of the tomatoes above the sugar, then a layer of sugar and another layer of tomatoes; let the sugar melt over a slack fire, then let cook slowly until the sugar penetrates the tomatoes, and they have a clear appearance. Remove to a platter and let dry in the sun; sprinkle with the syrup occasionally while drying.
Bar-le-duc Currants, Gooseberries, etc.
Take selected gooseberries or currants of large size, one by one, and with tiny embroidery scissors carefully cut the skin on one side, making a slit of perhaps one fourth an inch. Through this, with a sharp needle, remove the seeds, one at a time, to preserve the shape of the fruit.
Take the weight of the fruit in strained honey, and, when hot, add the prepared fruit. Let simmer three or four minutes. Carefully skim out the fruit. Reduce the syrup at a gentle simmer to the desired consistency. Pour over the fruit. Then store as jelly.
Two sweetmeats run together in one entry: candied tomatoes dried to a fig-like chew, and the seeded currant preserve of Bar-le-Duc. Both are slow, low-heat sugar work rather than canning, and neither is difficult so long as nothing boils hard.
- The hinge: never let it boilBoth preparations depend on the sugar or honey drawing into whole fruit without bursting it. A slack fire means the barest simmer, well under a rolling boil; once the syrup boils the peeled tomatoes break apart and the currants collapse into jam.
- Agate dishAgate (or agateware) is speckled enamelled steel, chosen because it does not react with acid fruit. Any enamelled cast iron, stainless steel or glass baking dish serves. Avoid bare aluminium or copper with tomatoes.
- ProportionsFive pounds of tomatoes to two pounds of brown sugar is roughly 40 percent sugar by weight of fruit, which is low for a preserve and is why the tomatoes must then be dried.
- Yellow pear tomatoesStill grown and still the right choice: small, firm, low in juice and thick enough in the wall to hold shape. Any cherry or grape tomato works; large slicing tomatoes will not, as they flood the pan with liquid.
- Drying without the sunOpen-air sun drying on a platter takes several days of hot dry weather and invites insects and mould in most climates. A dehydrator at 135-140F, or an oven at its lowest setting with the door cracked, gives a similar leathery, sugar-crusted result, though the time varies considerably with the size of the fruit and the appliance. Brush with the reserved syrup as they go.
- Seeding currantsThe Bar-le-Duc method is exactly as described and exactly as slow. Fine-pointed embroidery scissors and a stout needle, chilled fruit, and good light; figure an hour for a modest bowl. Gooseberries are easier than currants because they are larger.
- Honey by weight"The weight of the fruit in strained honey" means equal weights, not equal volumes. A mild honey (acacia, clover) is right; buckwheat or manuka will bury the fruit. Note that honey should not be given to children under one year old.
- "Store as jelly"That means hot jars, sealed and cooled. Because these are honey-and-fruit preserves at a lower sugar concentration than standard jam, treat them as refrigerator preserves and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process for the jars.
Tomato figs turn up repeatedly in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and farm journals, usually with the same claim attached: that a household with more tomatoes than it could eat could turn them into something resembling the imported dried figs that were expensive and seasonal. The name is descriptive rather than botanical, and the result really does eat like a fig, chewy, sweet and faintly acid. The Bar-le-Duc recipe pinned to the end belongs to a different world entirely: the town of Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine has long been known for a currant preserve -- white currant as much as red -- in which every seed is picked out of the whole berry by hand, traditionally said to have been done with a sharpened goose quill. It was a luxury export, sold in small glass jars, and its appearance in an American preserving manual of this period is a signal to the ambitious housekeeper that the confections of the French table were within reach of anyone with patience and good eyesight.