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Spiced Tomatoes
3 pounds of ripe fruit, pared and sliced; 1 pint of vinegar, 1 quart of sugar; add spices to taste and boil to a jam. Nice for cold meats.
A sweet-sour tomato preserve of the kind kept on the sideboard to cut cold roast meat. The proportions are sound; only the units and the finishing need translating.
- "Ripe fruit" is the tomatoThe title supplies the ingredient the ingredient list omits. Use 3 lb of ripe, meaty tomatoes; paste types such as Roma give less water and reach the jam stage sooner.
- ParedPeeled, not cored with a knife. Score the skins, dip 30 seconds in boiling water and slip them off, then slice.
- A quart of sugarSugar was measured by volume: about 4 cups, or 1 lb 12 oz to 2 lb. Against 3 lb of tomatoes and a pint (2 cups) of vinegar that is a firmly sweet preserve, closer to a jam than a pickle.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod vinegar was not standardised and its acidity varied; modern cider vinegar is sold at about 5 percent. Cider or white wine vinegar suits the spices; distilled white is harsher.
- Spices to tasteCinnamon stick, whole cloves and allspice, sometimes a blade of mace or a little ginger, would all suit. Tie whole spices in cloth and lift them out at the end; ground spice will cloud and darken the finished preserve.
- Boil to a jamExpect 45 minutes to well over an hour of open boiling, stirring often once it thickens, since the sugar will scorch. It is done at about 220F, or when a spoonful cooled on a cold plate holds a soft mound rather than running.
- Keeping itNo sealing method is given, so treat the result as a refrigerator condiment: pack hot into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled, where the sugar and vinegar will hold it several weeks. Shelf storage needs a current tested canning procedure.
- YieldRoughly 4 to 5 cups, depending how far you reduce it.
Spiced tomatoes belong to the large family of sweet pickles and "spiced fruits" that filled the relish shelf of nineteenth-century American households, where a sharp, sugary preserve was expected alongside cold beef, ham or mutton at supper. The tomato was still commonly treated as a fruit in cookery books of the period, and appears in preserve chapters cooked with sugar and whole spice exactly as peaches, plums and crab apples were. Recipes of this compressed sort, a line of proportions and a line of purpose, were the standard form in the community-compiled household libraries of the late 1800s and early 1900s: the writer assumed a cook who already knew what boiling to a jam looked like and needed only the ratio of fruit to sugar to vinegar.