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Tomato Butter
Seven pounds of ripe tomatoes, three and one-half pounds of brown sugar, one pint of vinegar, one ounce of cinnamon (in bag), one ounce of cloves (in bag), one lemon cut in small pieces. Let the tomatoes cook two hours before adding the other ingredients, then boil down thick.
— Mrs. Henry M. Miner
A sweet-sour tomato preserve of the kind that sat beside cold meat rather than on toast. The quantities are large by modern standards and the method is a long, unhurried reduction.
- ScaleSeven pounds of tomatoes reduce to roughly three to four pints of finished butter. Halving the recipe is sensible for a first attempt, and it shortens the boiling considerably.
- The pan matters mostUse the widest heavy non-reactive pot you own — stainless or enamelled, never bare aluminium or cast iron, which the vinegar will pick up as a metallic taste. Width gives evaporation; depth gives scorching.
- PeelingThe receipt gives no preparation instructions, but tomatoes for a butter are normally scalded and skinned first; skins otherwise curl into tough scraps through the finished butter. Core them and cut them up before the first two hours of cooking.
- Spice bagsAn ounce each of cinnamon and cloves means whole stick cinnamon and whole cloves tied in cheesecloth, not ground spice. An ounce of cloves is a great deal — taste at the halfway point and pull the bag when the flavour is where you want it.
- The lemonCut small means rind, pith and all, seeds removed. It cooks down into the butter and supplies pectin as well as acidity; do not substitute juice alone.
- "Boil down thick"Expect two to three more hours after the sugar and vinegar go in, over low heat with frequent stirring — sugar makes the bottom catch quickly. It is done when a spoonful dragged across the pan leaves a track that fills in slowly, and a spoonful on a chilled plate does not weep liquid at the edge.
- Keeping itThe book gives no instruction for sealing. Treat it as a refrigerator preserve good for a month or two, or process filled half-pint jars in a boiling-water bath following current tested times for tomato products.
- ServingThis is a condiment, not a jam. It belongs with roast pork, ham, cold beef or a sharp cheese.
Tomato butter belongs to the same family as apple butter and pear butter — fruit cooked down for hours with sugar and spice until it will spread — and in nineteenth-century American kitchens the tomato was often treated as a fruit for such purposes. Recipes for tomato butter, tomato preserves and tomato figs appear in community cookbooks of the period, where a heavy late-summer crop had to be dealt with before frost. Cinnamon, cloves and vinegar are the same trio used in mincemeat and pickled peaches, and they mark this as a relish for the meat course rather than the breakfast table. The book, like many of its kind, was assembled from the receipts of named local women, and the attribution to Mrs. Henry M. Miner — by her husband's name, as was conventional — reflects the practice of the period.