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Tomato Jelly
Cut ripe (but not overripe) tomatoes in quarters or thick slices; let cook in a double boiler or in a saucepan over a slow fire until soft throughout, then drain in a jelly bag. Let drain without pressure, or too much pulp for a clear jelly will be taken. For each quart of juice, add the thin yellow rind and the juice of a lemon. Let boil twenty minutes, then add a cup of sugar for each cup of the juice, set to cook, and let cook until a little of the mixture jellies on a cold saucer. If the tomatoes are very ripe, honey rather than jelly will result.
This condition may be remedied by the addition of a cup of apple juice to five or six cups of the tomato juice. Or apple parings with a few quartered apples may be cooked with the tomatoes.
CHAPTER V
A pectin-poor fruit coaxed into jelly by lemon and apple. The whole recipe turns on how much natural pectin is in the tomatoes, which is why the author gives two rescue measures.
- Do not press the bagDraining under pressure forces pulp through and the jelly turns cloudy and dull. Hang the bag and let gravity do it, ideally several hours or overnight in a cool place.
- MeasuresA quart of juice is 4 cups; the sugar is added cup for cup with juice, so a quart of juice takes 4 cups of sugar. Weigh if you can: 4 cups of granulated sugar is about 800 g.
- The lemon is the pectinThe lemon — The juice supplies the acid a gel needs, and the thin yellow rind adds flavour and a little pectin, though the white pith is the richer pectin source. Tomatoes are low in pectin, which is the problem the recipe is solving.
- Apple juice as insuranceIf your tomatoes are dead ripe, add the cup of apple juice per five or six cups of tomato juice at the start rather than waiting to see. Juice pressed from tart underripe apples, or from peels and cores simmered in water and strained, is far higher in pectin than sweet dessert apples.
- Order of operationsThe twenty-minute boil happens before the sugar goes in, concentrating the juice and extracting the lemon rind. Once sugar is added, cook hard and briefly; long boiling after sugar darkens the colour and can break the gel.
- The saucer test, with a numberJelly sets at about 220F (104C) at sea level, roughly 8F above the boiling point of water where you live. The cold-saucer test works, but pull the pan off the heat while you test or you will overshoot.
- "Honey rather than jelly"This means a thick syrup that never sets. It is not a failure to throw out; label it tomato syrup and use it as a glaze for pork or on toast.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield; a quart of juice with its sugar will fill several half-pint jars. Jellies of this kind were often served with cold meat or cheese rather than as a breakfast preserve.
- If you intend to keep itThe book stops at the gel and says nothing about sealing. Tomatoes are a low-acid fruit and the old practice of pouring into jars and sealing with paraffin is no longer considered sound; follow a current tested water-bath procedure for the filling and processing, or simply refrigerate the jelly and use it within a few weeks.
Tomato jelly and tomato preserves appear all through late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cookery, when the tomato was still handled as much like a fruit as a vegetable — put up in sweet conserves, figs, marmalades and jellies alongside quince and crabapple. A book of this period is writing for households that had no commercial powdered or liquid pectin on the shelf, so every jelly recipe is really a lesson in pectin management: pair a poor setter with a good one, lean on citrus rind and apple parings, and test on a cold saucer, since a thermometer was probably not something most kitchens could be assumed to have. The instruction not to press the jelly bag reflects a period standard that judged preserves largely by clarity, a jar of jelly being something shown as well as eaten. Bottled pectin arrived in the American market in the 1910s and 1920s and gradually made these workarounds optional, but the apple-parings trick long outlived it in home practice.