Home › Cookery › Tomato Marmalade or Sauce for Meats
Tomato Marmalade or Sauce for Meats
Scald and peel fully ripe tomatoes, then cut them up, if large. To twelve pounds add six pounds sugar, one tablespoonful beaten cloves, one tablespoonful spice and one tablespoonful cinnamon.
Boil all in a kettle until the syrup becomes the thickness of molasses. Then add one quart of strong vinegar and boil for ten minutes. Put away in quart jars--Mrs. McG.
A sweet-sour tomato preserve of the chutney family, meant to be spooned beside cold meat. The proportions are sound; only the vessels, a couple of the ingredient names, and the storage advice need translating.
- The hinge: cook it down before the vinegar goes inThe syrup must actually reach the thickness of molasses over the sugar alone, which on a modern burner takes well over an hour for a full batch. Adding the vinegar early only means boiling off acid and flavour for an hour; the final ten minutes is all it needs.
- "Spice" means allspice"Spice" most likely means allspice -- in nineteenth-century American receipts "spice" unqualified usually indicates ground allspice, and it is listed here alongside cloves and cinnamon. Use ground spices rather than whole unless you want to fish them out.
- Strong vinegarHousehold vinegar of the period was most often cider vinegar, and "strong" probably indicates full pickling strength rather than a weak table vinegar. Any modern vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity answers; avoid the 4 percent salad vinegars.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of tomatoes is a market-day quantity that assumes a large preserving kettle. A quarter batch — 3 lb tomatoes, 1 1/2 lb sugar, a cup of vinegar, and a scant teaspoon of each spice — behaves the same in a wide heavy pot.
- The kettleUse the widest heavy-bottomed pan you have. Depth slows evaporation and encourages scorching; once the mixture thickens it needs near-constant stirring, and a scorched batch cannot be rescued.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold will slip the skins. Cores and any hard shoulders should come out too, since they never soften into the syrup.
- YieldThe full recipe gives roughly six to seven quarts' worth of raw material reducing to something nearer five or six pints of finished marmalade, depending how far you take it.
- Storage"Put away in quart jars" is open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered a safe seal for anything. Treat this as a refrigerator preserve, good for a few weeks, or freeze it in small containers. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested tomato-chutney procedure for the processing step.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with an initial like Mrs. McG. — the book is a compiled community cookbook as much as an authored one. A sweet spiced tomato preserve cut with vinegar sits squarely in the Anglo-American taste for fruit "catsups" and marmalades served with roast and cold meats, a habit that predates commercial bottled sauce and owes a good deal to the imported Indian chutneys popular in British kitchens through the same century. Tomatoes, often said to have been regarded with suspicion in the early United States, had become thoroughly ordinary by the 1870s and turn up in this book in soups, pickles, catsups and preserves alike. The high sugar and the late-added vinegar are doing preservation work as much as flavour work in a house with no refrigeration, and the instruction to boil until the syrup thickens "to the thickness of molasses" is the sort of comparison a cook could actually judge by eye in a kitchen without a thermometer.