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Tomato Marmalade
Weigh the fruit, and take as many ounces of sugar as there are pounds of tomatoes. Put this sugar into a preserving-pan, place it upon a gentle fire, and stir until it melts and acquires a light-brown colour. Throw into it three or four onions finely minced, allowing one small onion for each pound of tomatoes. When these are slightly browned, put into the pan the tomatoes cut into quarters, and add a slight seasoning of pepper, salt, powdered mace, and grated nutmeg. Boil all together till the tomatoes are reduced to pulp, strain the juice through a sieve, and boil it quickly until it will jelly when a small portion is poured upon a plate. Put the marmalade into jars, and cover with double layers of very thick paper. Time, two and a half to three hours.
This is a savoury tomato preserve in the mould of nineteenth-century ketchups and store sauces, not a sweet breakfast marmalade. The method is sound as cookery but the keeping instructions are not, and the finished jars cannot be stored as the book directs.
- Why this one failsThe sugar here is roughly one ounce to the pound of tomatoes, about six per cent by weight. That is a seasoning, not a preservative: real jam runs at 60 per cent or more sugar, which is what makes a paper-covered jar safe on a shelf.
- The onions are the specific problemOne small onion per pound of tomatoes drags the whole mixture out of the reliably acid range that makes tomato preserves safe. A low-acid, low-sugar pur oom at room temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, and contaminated food may give no warning at all in smell, taste or appearance.
- Paper is not a sealDouble layers of thick paper were meant to exclude dust and slow evaporation on a high-sugar conserve. They do not exclude mould spores or yeasts, and they provide none of the vacuum or heat processing that shelf-stable vegetable preserves require. For a keeping tomato preserve, use a current tested recipe with measured acidification and a specified process time.
- Preserving-panTypically a copper or brass pan, wide and shallow, used for the fast open evaporation that jam-making needs. A wide stainless or enamelled pan is the modern equivalent; the width matters more than the material.
- The sugar is caramelised firstMelting the sugar to a light brown before the onions go in is a deliberate step, and it contributes much of the colour and depth of the finished sauce. Taken past light brown it turns bitter, and there is no recovering it.
- What gets jarredThe wording is easy to misread: the tomatoes are cooked to a pulp, the liquid is passed through a sieve, and it is that strained liquid which is boiled down to setting point. The skins and seeds left in the sieve are discarded.
- Time and yieldTwo and a half to three hours reflects reducing a large quantity of very watery fruit over an open fire. Tomatoes are about 95 per cent water, so the finished quantity will be a small fraction of the weight of fruit you start with.
The recipe sits among a run of tomato entries that reflect how new the fruit still was to British cooking in the 1870s and 80s: the tomato is often said to have been grown in England for centuries as an ornamental curiosity, a much-repeated account rather than settled fact, and it was only becoming a common market vegetable as glasshouse growing and imports from the Channel Islands and the Mediterranean expanded. "Marmalade" in Victorian usage meant any fruit boiled to a thick, spoonable mass, not specifically a citrus conserve, so a savoury version thickened with caramel and onion sat comfortably under the name. Recipes like this one belong to the same family as mushroom ketchup and the bottled store sauces every well-run kitchen kept, made in bulk when a glut arrived and drawn on through the winter for gravies, cold meat and made-up dishes.