Tomato Wine
Pick small, ripe tomatoes off the stems, put them in a clean bucket or tub, mash well, and strain through a linen rag (a bushel well make five gallons of juice). Add from two and a half to three pounds brown sugar to each gallon. Put in a cash and let it ferment like raspberry wine. If two gallons water be added to a bushel of tomatoes, the wine will be as good.--Mrs. A. I.
A country wine recipe with the fermentation left almost entirely to the reader's judgment, on the assumption that anyone in the house already knew how raspberry wine was made. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- "Put in a cash"A printer's error for cask. Any food-grade fermenting vessel works; the point is a container that can be loosely covered during the vigorous stage and then sealed under an airlock.
- A bushel of tomatoesAbout 53 lb, which is consistent with the five gallons of juice claimed. If you are scaling down, work from the juice: 2.5 to 3 lb brown sugar per gallon of juice.
- What the sugar doesThat much sugar puts the potential alcohol somewhere in the region of 12 to 15 percent, depending on how you read the gallon and how ripe the fruit is, which is a large part of why the wine keeps at all. Cutting it back sharply to suit modern taste leaves a weaker liquid that is much more vulnerable to spoiling.
- "Ferment like raspberry wine"The compiler assumes the reader already knows the house method. Nineteenth-century country-wine receipts differ: some let the juice take up whatever yeast came in on the fruit, others call for added yeast. Cultured wine yeast pitched into strained juice is what makes the modern version predictable rather than a coin toss.
- The hinge: keep air off itTomato juice is thin, low in tannin and only weakly acidic, which makes it easy prey for acetobacter. Once the vigorous foaming stops, get it under an airlock or into a full, sealed container, or you will finish with tomato vinegar.
- AcidityRipe tomatoes sit near the borderline that winemakers care about, and the recipe's optional two gallons of water dilutes what acid there is. Current home-winemaking guidance covers testing and adjusting acid, and it is the one thing this recipe does not address at all.
- StrainingThe linen rag is a jelly bag. Coarse nylon straining bags or several layers of cheesecloth do the same job; press only lightly, since tomato pulp will push through and leave the wine permanently cloudy.
- SanitationA "clean bucket or tub" was the standard of the day. Sanitize everything that touches the juice, since there is no cooking step anywhere in the process to knock back spoilage organisms.
- Time and yieldNo timing is given. Expect a week or two of primary fermentation, then months of settling and racking before it is worth tasting; a bushel yields roughly five gallons, or about 25 standard bottles.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited by name or initials, belongs to the generation of American books that treat the tomato as thoroughly domesticated. It is often said that fifty years earlier the fruit was still regarded with suspicion in much of the country, though tomatoes were grown and eaten in the American South well before then; by the 1870s Southern households were canning it, ketchuping it, and, as here, fermenting the surplus. Tomato wine turns up in a scattering of nineteenth-century American receipt books and farm papers, always in the same spirit as dandelion, parsnip or rhubarb wine: a way to convert a glut that would otherwise rot into something that keeps. It was never a commercial product of any consequence, and the instructions are correspondingly casual about method and precise about sugar per gallon. The contributor's closing remark, that adding two gallons of water to the bushel makes wine "as good," is the frankest thing on the page about what the drink was actually valued for.