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Tomato Honey
To each pound of ripe tomatoes allow the grated rind of a lemon. Cut the tomatoes in small pieces, add the rind, and let cook rapidly till the water is evaporated, then strain through a fine sieve. Measure the pulp and for each pint take a pound of sugar (two cups) and the juice of a lemon. Let all cook together very quickly until quite thick, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon. Apples or pears may be prepared by this recipe.
A smooth tomato preserve of the fruit-butter family, thickened by evaporation rather than added pectin. The recipe assumes you know when a preserve is done, so the finishing point is the thing to watch.
- MeasuresA pint of pulp is two cups; the original helpfully glosses a pound of sugar as two cups. Sugar is measured against the strained pulp, not the raw tomatoes, so you cannot weigh it out in advance.
- The hinge: cook it down twiceThe first cooking drives off tomato water before straining; the second is where the preserve sets. Sugar-heavy preserves of this kind finish at about 220F, or when a spoonful mounded on a chilled plate holds its shape rather than weeping.
- "Very quickly" means high heat and a wide panRapid boiling in a broad, heavy pan evaporates fast and keeps the colour bright. A deep narrow pot will scorch the bottom long before the mass thickens, and once tomato sugar catches it tastes of it throughout.
- Grated rindTake only the coloured zest, none of the white pith beneath, and add it to the first cooking so the oils have time to disperse. Lemon juice goes in later, with the sugar, where it does the most for flavour and set.
- Choice of tomatoPaste types such as Roma give far more pulp per pound than watery slicing tomatoes and cut the first cooking substantially. Peeling is unnecessary since everything goes through a fine sieve.
- Wooden spoonProbably specified because tomato and lemon acid could react with the tinned or iron utensils of the period; the recipe itself gives no reason. Modern stainless is fine; a silicone spatula scrapes the pan corners better.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of ripe tomatoes yield roughly two half-pint jars. The recipe gives no sealing or processing instructions at all, so treat it as a refrigerator preserve, good several weeks; for shelf-stable jars follow a current tested water-bath procedure for tomato preserves.
- ServingThick, tart-sweet and lemon-scented rather than savoury. It belongs on toast, biscuits or with soft cheese, and the apple or pear variation at the end needs less initial reduction because those fruits carry less free water.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks routinely treated the tomato as a fruit for the preserving kettle, putting up tomato figs, tomato marmalade, tomato butter and this "honey," the name often said to come from its thick amber body rather than from any honey in the pot. The same naming logic gave us apple butter: a household vocabulary in which the word described the texture on the spoon. Preserves like this made sense in a season when tomatoes arrived faster than a family could eat them and sugar was among the reliable preservatives at hand, and lemon rind and juice supplied both the perfume and the acidity that ripe tomatoes lack. Books of the canning-and-preserving genre, which proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century as home economics became a formal subject, carried these older recipes forward largely unchanged, which is why the instructions here still assume a cook who judges doneness by eye and by the drag of the spoon.