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Tomato Store Sauce
Take a dozen ripe tomatoes, put them in an earthen jar, and set them in a cool oven until they are quite soft. Take off the skins and stalks, mix with the tomatoes the liquor that flowed from them when baked, and add a dessert-spoonful of salt, a dessert-spoonful of powdered ginger, a pinch of cayenne, and two table-spoonfuls of vinegar. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, put the sauce into dry wide-mouthed bottles, and store in a cool dry place. Examine and taste it at the end of a week or a fortnight, and if it does not seem as if it would keep, boil it again with a little more cayenne and ginger. This sauce will keep for a long time. It will not be properly flavoured till ten days or a fortnight after it is made, though it may be used at once. Some cooks add a head of garlic to the other ingredients, but this is not generally liked. Time, four to five hours.
This is a shelf-stable tomato preserve with almost no acid, no heat processing of the sealed bottle, and no seal to speak of. The method belongs to a period before anyone understood why some jars of vegetables killed people.
- The acid is far too lowTwo tablespoons of vinegar against a dozen baked tomatoes is a seasoning, not a preservative. Tomatoes sit close to pH 4.6 on their own and modern varieties are often above it, which puts this sauce squarely in the range where Clostridium botulinum can grow. Tested tomato recipes specify bottled lemon juice or citric acid by measured amount for exactly this reason.
- Nothing reaches a killing temperatureA "cool oven" softens the fruit but the pulp itself never approaches boiling, and the filled bottles are given no processing at all. Botulinum spores survive this comfortably and then find an airless, low-acid, room-temperature home.
- The keeping test is the dangerous partBotulinum toxin produces no smell, no cloudiness and no off taste. Tasting the sauce after a week or a fortnight to judge whether "it does not seem as if it would keep" cannot detect the one thing that would harm you, and tasting is itself the exposure.
- Wide-mouthed bottles, no sealWide-mouthed bottles, no stated seal -- the recipe calls for dry wide-mouthed bottles in a cool dry place and specifies no stopper or sealing step at all. The original relies on salt, ginger and cayenne as preservatives; none of the three has meaningful antimicrobial effect at these quantities.
- Reboiling does not undo itThe instruction to boil again with more cayenne and ginger would kill yeasts and moulds, which is what the writer was worried about. It does not destroy spores, and boiling an already-spoiled batch cannot make it safe to keep.
- If you want this flavourBaked tomato pulp with ginger, cayenne and vinegar is a good sauce. Use a current tested recipe for canned tomato products, or treat it as a fresh sauce and keep it refrigerated for a few days.
- Reading the originalA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons, midway between tea and table. "Time, four to five hours" refers to the slow oven baking of the whole tomatoes, not to any boiling stage.
Cassell's places this among the "store sauces" — bottled seasonings kept on the shelf to be spooned into gravies, hashes and cold meat, the domestic ancestors of commercial ketchup. Nineteenth-century English kitchens made store sauces from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters and anchovies as well as tomatoes, and the successful ones leaned heavily on salt, vinegar or spirits for keeping. The ginger-and-cayenne seasoning reflects the Anglo-Indian taste that ran through Victorian sauce-making, and the note that the flavour is not right for ten days or a fortnight is a genuine observation: spices bloom into a wet medium slowly. Domestic bottling of this kind persisted for decades before the mechanism of botulism was understood, which is why guidance from the 1920s onward began insisting on measured acid and timed processing rather than the cook's judgement.