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Tomato Butter
20 pounds of ripe tomatoes, 8 pounds of sugar, Juice of four lemons, 4 pounds of apples, 1 tablespoonful of powdered ginger.
Scald the tomatoes and remove the skins. Put in a porcelain kettle with the apples pared, cored and quartered. Stand over a moderate fire one hour, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Then add the sugar, lemon juice, and ginger. Cook slowly and stir continually till reduced to the consistency of marmalade. Put into tumblers, or jars and when cold, tie up with two thicknesses of tissue paper. Moisten the top with water or white of egg and when dry place in a cool dark place to keep.
The cooking here is ordinary fruit-butter work, but the preserving instructions are pre-modern and unsafe by current standards. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a fix.
- The seal is not a sealTissue paper moistened with water or egg white was a nineteenth-century way of excluding dust and slowing evaporation; it is permeable and non-sterile. Nothing in the method sterilises the jars, drives out air, or creates a vacuum, so the contents are open to mould and yeast during storage.
- No heat processingThe butter is potted hot and simply left to cool in a dark cupboard. There is no boiling-water bath, no measured processing time, and no headspace given, so this cannot be treated as canning in any modern sense.
- Tomatoes are borderline acidTomatoes sit close to pH 4.6, the line below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow, and their acidity varies with variety and with ripeness. Current tested recipes for tomato preserves specify added bottled lemon juice or citric acid in measured amounts per jar for exactly this reason; the lemon juice here is seasoning, not a measured acidification step.
- Sugar alone is not enoughEight pounds of sugar to twenty-four pounds of fruit gives a lower final sugar concentration than a true jam or jelly, and the water activity of a soft fruit butter is generally too high to be self-preserving. Use a current, tested recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want a shelf-stable tomato butter.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled or porcelain-lined pot, specified because bare iron and brass react with the acid and taint the fruit. Stainless steel or enamel serves the same purpose.
- ScaleTwenty-four pounds of fruit plus eight pounds of sugar is a farmhouse batch that will fill a large preserving pan to the brim and take several hours to reduce. It reflects a household putting up a season's tomatoes at once, not a weekend batch.
"Butter" in American preserving language means fruit cooked down slowly with sugar until it is thick, opaque and spreadable, with no whole pieces and no dairy involved at all — apple butter is often said to be the parent of the whole family, and pear, peach, plum and quince butters follow the same method. Tomato versions were common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books, where the tomato was still treated frankly as a fruit: it appears in preserves, marmalades, sweet pickles and even pies. The apples here are doing structural work as much as flavouring, since they carry the pectin that tomatoes lack, and the ginger and lemon are the standard warm-and-sharp seasoning of the period's sweet preserves. Recipes like this one belong to the era before home canning was standardised, when a cool dark cellar and a paper cover were what a cook had.