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Preserved Green Tomatoes
Wash one peck of green tomatoes, cover with boiling water and stand aside thirty minutes. Wipe and cut into slices. Slice also six large, juicy lemons; carefully remove the seeds. Put the tomatoes in a porcelain kettle, add the lemons, six pounds of granulated sugar, an even tablespoonful of ground ginger or small pieces of root ginger sliced, and a half pint of water to prevent burning. Cover the kettle and cook slowly one and a half hours, skimming carefully. Stand aside to cool. When cold, bring again to boiling point and simmer gently another hour; then put into small jars or tumblers. When cold tie as directed.
A late-season sweet preserve rather than a pickle: green tomatoes candied in a heavy sugar syrup with lemon and ginger. The two-stage cooking is the point, and the storage instruction is the part that needs rethinking.
- Why it is cooked twiceBoiling, letting the pan go completely cold, then boiling again lets the syrup penetrate the tomato slices gradually so they stay whole and translucent instead of collapsing. Cooking straight through for two and a half hours gives you a coarse jam. Do not skip the cold rest.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. With six pounds of sugar (about 13 1/2 cups) the ratio is close to a pound of sugar for every two pounds of fruit, which is what sets the preserve.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-lined pot, not porcelain. Any non-reactive heavy pan works; bare aluminium or unlined copper will react with the lemon juice and dull the colour.
- The scalding waterThe half hour under boiling water softens the firm green fruit before slicing. The recipe has you wipe the tomatoes dry after the soak, before cutting, so you are not adding more water to the syrup than the half pint called for.
- LemonsSlice them thin, crosswise, rind and all, and pick out every seed; the seeds turn the syrup bitter over a long cook. Two and a half hours of simmering is what makes the peel tender, so do not shorten it.
- GingerA tablespoon of ground ginger is mild against 12 lb of fruit. Sliced dried root ginger gives cleaner heat and can be fished out at the end; fresh ginger will work but is sharper and less warm.
- SkimmingSkim the grey foam off during the first cook, as the recipe directs; the second cook needs less attention. Left in, it clouds the syrup.
- "Tie as directed"The instruction points back to the book's general directions elsewhere, which for tumblers of preserve would have meant paper or cloth covers tied down, sometimes over a layer of paraffin. This is not a safe seal by current standards. Refrigerate the filled jars, or process them following present-day tested water-bath instructions for sweet preserves.
- YieldExpect somewhere near eight to ten pints. Served as a conserve with cold meat, or on bread and butter, not as a vegetable side.
Green tomato preserves were a frost recipe. A killing frost ends the tomato season with the vines still loaded with fruit that will never ripen, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of ways to use them up: chow-chow, mincemeat, pies, and sweet preserves like this one. Sugar was cheap enough that putting six pounds of it into a batch of otherwise worthless fruit made sense, and the lemon and ginger are doing the same work here that they do in marmalade, supplying acid and aromatic bite to a fruit that has almost no flavour of its own. The long candying is a preserving technique older than canning: sugar concentration, not heat processing, is what was meant to keep the jars. It may be why the original ends so casually with "tie as directed" instead of any instruction about sealing or sterilising.