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Ripe Tomato Preserves (Stand them in the hot sun one)
stand them in the hot sun one or two days to dry.
Sprinkle several times during the drying with granulated sugar. When perfectly dry pack them in jars with layers of sugar between. Care must be taken not to let the rain or dew fall on them while drying.
This is the tail end of a longer method — the page begins mid-sentence, after whatever step scalded, peeled or sugared the tomatoes. What survives describes an open-air sun preserve, and it is the preserving method, not the missing first half, that makes the recipe unusable now.
- Why this one failsFruit is left in the open air for one to two days at ambient temperature, then packed into jars with nothing but layers of sugar between, with no heat processing, no measured sugar ratio and no acidification anywhere in the surviving text. Because the page begins mid-sentence we cannot know what the missing opening steps did; nothing in what survives reaches a temperature or a water-activity level that reliably stops mould and yeast growth.
- Tomatoes are borderline acidRipe tomatoes sit close to pH 4.6, the line that separates foods safe for boiling-water processing from those that need pressure canning or added acid. Many modern cultivars test on the wrong side of it, which is why current guidance requires added lemon juice or citric acid for any canned tomato product.
- Open-air dryingTwo days uncovered invites insects, birds, airborne mould spores and dust. The instruction to keep off rain and dew is the only control offered, and it addresses only one of those problems.
- Sugar without a ratioSugar preserves by binding water, but only above roughly 65 percent of the finished weight. "Layers of sugar between" gives no ratio at all, and sun-dried tomato flesh holds enough residual moisture to let the surface sugar dissolve into a dilute syrup — the opposite of a preservative.
- Jars, not canning"Pack them in jars" here means a storage crock or a jar with a lid, not a sealed and processed jar.
- If you want the dishSweet preserved tomatoes are still worth making. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with weighed sugar, added acid and a specified processing time.
Sun preserves were a standing feature of American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, and tomato versions were among them. The technique — spreading sugared fruit on platters or boards in full sun, sometimes under glass, and bringing it indoors each evening — was valued because it kept the fruit's colour and shape in a way that long boiling did not, and because it cost no fuel in the hottest weeks of the year, when a kitchen range was the last thing anyone wanted lit. Small firm varieties were preferred: the yellow pear and the little red cherry tomatoes appear in such entries, sweetened until they ate more like a candied fruit than a vegetable. That ambiguity is the point of the recipe's placement here. A book called How to Cook Vegetables files the tomato under vegetables, as the market and the dinner table did, while this particular preparation treats it frankly as fruit — a reminder that the tomato's category was settled by custom and tariff law rather than by botany.