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Green Tomato Sweetmeats
Slice the tomatoes and soak them a day and night in salt and water, then in fresh water for an hour or two, then scald in alum water with grape leaves. When taken out of alum water, put in cold water to cook. Scald in ginger-tea and again put in cold water, while you make the syrup. To each pound tomatoes put one and a quarter pounds sugar and a few races of white ginger. Cook the tomatoes till clear, the syrup till thick. When cool, season the syrup with essence of lemon and pour over the tomatoes.--Mrs. C. M.
A candied preserve rather than a pickle: green tomatoes are firmed, blanched through several waters, then cooked in a heavy syrup. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a preserving kettle and a brine look like, so a few of the steps need translating.
- Races of gingerA "race" is a whole hand or root of ginger, the word going back through Old French to Latin radix, root. White ginger here means scraped or peeled root, as against unscraped black ginger. The recipe does not say how many; a few pieces to a batch is the sense, and fresh ginger sliced thin will do the same work.
- Ginger-teaSimply a strong decoction of ginger root in water, used as a scalding bath to perfume the fruit before it ever meets the sugar. It is not drunk and not added to the syrup.
- Alum and grape leavesBoth were crisping agents: alum for firmness, grape leaves for tannin. Alum is no longer recommended for home preserving in the United States and contributes nothing that a shorter cook and firm, hard green fruit will not. Grape leaves are harmless and still used in cucumber pickling.
- The salt soakNo proportion is given, and period recipes varied widely, from light soaks to brine strong enough to float an egg. Something on the order of a cup of salt to a gallon of water will serve; the point is to draw water from the slices, and the long rinse afterward is what keeps the finished sweetmeat from tasting salty. Do not shorten the rinse.
- Essence of lemonOil of lemon, usually dissolved in spirit, not lemon juice, and generally stronger than modern lemon extract. A few drops stirred into the cooled syrup is the intent; a spoonful will taste of furniture polish. Grated zest is a fair substitute.
- Sugar ratioOne and a quarter pounds sugar to each pound of fruit is about 2 3/4 cups per pound. That is what makes this a sweetmeat rather than a relish, and it is also what preserves it; do not reduce it.
- Knowing when it is doneThe hinge is the two-stage cook: the fruit is finished when the slices turn translucent, the syrup when it sheets from the spoon or reaches about 220F. Boiling the tomatoes on to thicken the syrup will collapse them into pulp — lift the fruit out and reduce the syrup alone if need be.
- StorageThe recipe stops at the pouring and says nothing about sealing. Tomatoes sit at the borderline of safe acidity for canning, so keep the finished sweetmeats refrigerated and eat within a few weeks, or follow a current tested recipe with added acid if you want shelf-stable jars.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from recipes contributed by some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with a name or a set of initials as this one does. Green tomato sweetmeats belong to the end-of-season economy of a kitchen garden: the last hard fruit on the vine would never ripen before frost, and sugar turned it into something that kept. The word sweetmeat in this period covers candied and syrup-preserved fruit generally, not confectionery in the modern sense, and green tomatoes were treated much as citron melon or watermelon rind were — bland, firm flesh valued for holding its shape and taking on whatever flavoring the cook chose, here ginger and lemon. The alum-and-grape-leaf step is a survival from a much older preserving tradition and appears throughout nineteenth-century American pickle and sweetmeat receipts.