Tomato Jelly
Take ripe tomatoes, peel them carefully, cutting out all the seams and rough places. To every pound put half a pound of sugar. Season with white ginger and mace. Boil to a stiff jelly, then add enough good eider vinegar to keep it.--Mrs. Dr. P. C.
A nineteenth-century sweet tomato preserve, closer to a spiced jam than to what a modern cook calls jelly. The proportions are given by weight, which makes it easy to scale.
- Ratio and yieldRatio -- Half a pound of sugar to every pound of peeled tomato is the whole formula. The recipe gives no yield; how much you finish with depends on how far the mixture is boiled down.
- "Jelly" here means a stiff preserveThere is no added pectin, no straining and no clear set intended. The mixture thickens because tomato pulp and sugar reduce until they mound on a spoon; expect somewhere around 45 minutes to well over an hour of open-pan boiling, stirring often once it thickens or the sugar will scorch.
- Peeling and "seams"Drop the tomatoes in boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds and the skins slip off. The "seams and rough places" most likely mean the pale corky core and the tough ribs at the stem end, which never soften and would leave hard threads in the finished preserve.
- White gingerDried ginger root scraped of its skin and dried pale, often limed, sold whole and grated or bruised as needed. Ground dried ginger is the practical substitute; start at half a teaspoon per pound of fruit.
- MaceThe lacy aril around the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Blades of whole mace can be simmered in and fished out; ground mace goes in near the end, since long boiling flattens it.
- The vinegarCider vinegar (the "eider" of the text is a misprint) goes in at the end, after the boiling, both for acidity and to cut the sweetness. Add it a tablespoon at a time and taste, since "enough to keep it" gives no measure at all.
- StorageDo not treat this as shelf-stable. Tomatoes sit on the borderline of the acidity needed for safe water-bath canning, and the vinegar here is unmeasured. Refrigerate the finished preserve and use it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested recipe if you want to can it.
- ServingThe ginger and mace suggest it would sit well with cold meats, ham or game, though preserves of this kind were also eaten simply as sweetmeats.
Sweet tomato preserves were common in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, when the tomato was still handled as often like a fruit as a vegetable. Books of the period carry tomato figs, tomato marmalade and tomato preserves alongside peach and quince, generally sugared pound for half-pound and spiced with ginger, mace or lemon. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered such receipts from named Virginia contributors, which is why so many entries close with initials rather than a full name. The vinegar finish is the older preserving instinct at work: sugar alone was not trusted to hold a low-acid fruit through a Virginia summer.