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Tomato Marmalade
4 quarts ripe tomatoes 6 lemons I cup raisins, seeded 4 pounds granulated sugar Peel the tomatoes and cut the pulp in thin slices. Cut the lemons in halves, lengthwise, then slice exceedingly thin. Put all the fruit into a saucepan in layers, alternating with the sugar. Let cook one hour on the front of the stove, then move back and let simmer until the mixture is of the consistency of marmalade.
Store while hot as jelly. The recipe gives about 2½ quarts of marmalade.
Rhubarb Jam (Mrs. Jordan) 2 lemons 5 pounds rhubarb cut in 2 pounds chopped figs small pieces 6 pounds sugar Two lemons chopped fine, soaked in water to cover over night, then cooked tender. Dispose the rhubarb and sugar in layers in a saucepan and let stand over night. In the morning add the figs and lemons and let cook until thick (about half an hour).
Two preserves run together on one page: a tomato marmalade and, following it, Mrs. Jordan's rhubarb and fig jam. Both are straightforward high-sugar preserves, but the tomato marmalade has a printing error in its yield and a rind problem that will decide whether the finished jar is pleasant or leathery.
- The hinge: soften the rind firstCitrus peel stops softening once the syrup gets sugary and concentrated. Slice the lemons as thin as you can manage, and if the rind still feels firm after the first hour of open cooking, add a little water and keep it there until the peel is tender before you let the mixture thicken.
- "Front of the stove" and "move back"On a coal or wood range the front was the hot zone and the back the cool one. Read it as a brisk simmer for an hour, then the lowest heat that keeps it moving, stirring often as it thickens because tomato scorches.
- The yield is a misprintFour quarts of tomatoes and four pounds of sugar cannot produce 24 quarts of marmalade. Expect roughly 4 to 5 pints. Treat the printed figure as a typesetting slip rather than any guide to quantities.
- Quantities in modern termsFour quarts of tomatoes is roughly 7 to 8 lb of whole fruit, and more if you read the four quarts as peeled sliced pulp; four pounds of granulated sugar is about 9 cups. For the rhubarb jam, 5 lb rhubarb to 6 lb sugar is a very sweet ratio by current taste, and the overnight maceration draws out the juice so the fruit holds its shape.
- Peeling the tomatoesBlanch 30 seconds in boiling water and slip the skins. Paste-type tomatoes give a thicker marmalade with less cooking than watery slicing tomatoes.
- Setting without added pectinTomatoes contribute almost no pectin; the lemons, rind and all, supply it. Test on a chilled plate rather than by the clock — the marmalade is done when a spoonful cooled for a minute wrinkles when pushed.
- "Store while hot as jelly"That means the open-kettle method: hot preserve into hot jars, sealed at once. Current practice is to fill sterilized jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath, which is what keeps mold and yeast out of a jar meant to sit on a shelf for a year.
- The figsAlmost certainly dried figs, stems removed and chopped; they thicken the rhubarb jam considerably and can catch on the bottom, so stir from the moment they go in.
Marmalade began as a quince paste — the word comes through Portuguese marmelada, from marmelo, quince — and only later attached itself to citrus preserves and then, loosely, to any thick preserve holding shreds of fruit or peel. Tomato marmalade belongs to a family of American preserves that treated the tomato frankly as a fruit: alongside green tomato mincemeat, tomato figs and tomato preserves, it appears in household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The lemons here do double duty, supplying both the acid and the pectin that tomatoes lack. The recipe following it is credited to Mrs. Jordan, in the manner of the domestic-science books of the period, which drew on contributions from cooking-school pupils and readers and printed the donor's name.