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Tomato Preserve
Red currant juice Choose ripe, sound, well-colored tomatoes and rub them through a sieve; put the juice and the purée into an earthenware pan and boil for five minutes, stirring all the time, then let it drain through a napkin stretched out as for jelly straining; weigh all that remains on the napkin, and for each pound of pulp allow one pound of sugar. Put the sugar into a pan with half a pint of water, let it dissolve, and cook it till it reaches 236° F., or the "small ball" (i. e., on dipping the finger and thumb first into cold water and then into the syrup, and again into cold water, the sugar from the fingers forms a small ball), keeping it well skimmed; then add the tomato pulp and half a cupful of red currant juice for every pound of the pulp. Place on the fire and stir continuously till it reaches 220° F.; then let the preserve cook for three minutes more and pot in the usual way.
A French-style confiture built on a sugar syrup rather than a straight boil-up, with red currant juice supplying the acid and pectin that tomatoes lack. The stray line "Red currant juice" at the head is a leftover ingredient heading, not an instruction.
- The hinge: two separate temperaturesThe sugar syrup goes to 236F on its own, before the pulp is added; the finished preserve goes to 220F. Confusing the two ruins the batch. A digital thermometer replaces the finger-and-thumb ball test entirely.
- 220F is a sea-level figureJam sets roughly 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. Above about 1,000 feet, boil water first, read the thermometer, and add 8F to that number rather than chasing 220.
- An earthenware panRead this as any wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled cast iron. Untinned copper, aluminium and bare iron will discolour the fruit and pick up the acid from the currants.
- Straining through a napkinHere the napkin keeps the pulp, not the juice — the reverse of jelly-making. The watery liquid that drips through is discarded; what stays behind is what you weigh. Line a colander with a doubled square of muslin and let it drain an hour or more.
- Weighing after drainingNo yield is given because it depends on how watery the tomatoes are. Reckon on 4 lb of ripe tomatoes producing somewhere near 1 to 1.5 lb of drained pulp, and buy your sugar accordingly.
- Red currant juiceNot decorative. Red currants are high in both pectin and acid, and they are what makes a low-acid tomato behave like jam. If currants are out of reach, a comparable volume of tart apple juice plus lemon is a reasonable substitute, though the colour and flavour shift.
- PottingAt the time this meant hot jars sealed with paraffin wax or waxed paper discs, which is no longer considered adequate. Fill sterilised jars, seal with two-piece lids, and process in a boiling-water bath according to current tested guidance for tomato preserves; refrigerate anything you do not process.
- Half a pint of waterIf the measure is American, half a pint is one cup; in an English book it would be 10 fl oz. Either way it is only the vehicle for dissolving the sugar, and most of it boils away on the way to 236F. Do not increase it.
- SkimmingSkim the syrup persistently. Scum trapped in a preserve cooked to the set point does not settle out later, and it clouds an otherwise clear, deep-red jar.
Tomato preserves and tomato "figs" were a fixture of nineteenth-century American and English preserving books, from a period when the tomato sat comfortably on the sweet side of the kitchen — stewed with sugar, candied, or turned into jam — rather than being confined to savoury dishes. The method here is French in construction: a sugar syrup cooked to the petit boulé or small-ball stage before the fruit ever meets it, closer to a confectioner's approach than a farmhouse one. The red currant juice is doing quiet technical work. Tomatoes carry little pectin and, for jam purposes, marginal acidity, and currant juice was a common corrective added to weak fruits, in the role commercial pectin would later fill.