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Tomato Figs
3 pounds of granulated sugar. 6 pounds of tomatoes, Select tomatoes quite ripe but small and smooth. Scald and remove the skins. Place a layer of tomatoes in a porcelain kettle, strew them thickly with sugar, place them over a very moderate fire, and stew very slowly until the sugar appears to have penetrated the tomatoes. Lift each tomato carefully with a spoon, spread them on dishes and
A candied preserve rather than a vegetable dish: tomatoes cooked in their own weight of syrup, then dried until leathery and sweet like figs. Note that the text breaks off mid-sentence — the original continues with drying the fruit, and the notes below explain what that step involves.
- The hinge: slow, gentle heat"A very moderate fire" means the barest simmer, low enough that the tomatoes hold their shape while sugar migrates into them. Any real boil bursts the skins and you end up with jam instead of whole candied fruit. Expect an hour or more, undisturbed except for occasional gentle shaking of the pan.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamel-lined or otherwise non-reactive pan. Bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper will discolour the syrup and pick up a metallic taste from the tomato acid; stainless steel or enamelled cast iron is the equivalent today.
- Sugar ratioThree pounds sugar to six pounds tomatoes is half the fruit's weight (not, as the intro says, its equal). Keep the full amount: the sugar both flavours the fruit and, together with thorough drying, helps it keep.
- Choice of tomato"Small and smooth" suggests small round or plum-shaped fruit; small plum or cherry tomatoes are the nearest thing today. Fleshy, low-juice paste types dry best; large slicing tomatoes collapse and weep.
- Scalding to skinThirty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold, and the skins slip off. Cut a shallow cross in the blossom end first if they resist.
- The missing endingThe verbatim text stops at "spread them on dishes and". Comparable printed versions of the period finish by drying the fruit in the sun over several days, turning it, then dusting with sugar and packing it in layers. A low oven or dehydrator at around 135-150F does the same work in a day or so, without exposure to insects and dew.
- The leftover syrupWhat is left in the pan is a thick tomato syrup worth keeping. Bottle it and refrigerate; it is good on toast or with cheese.
- Yield and keepingThe finished weight is hard to predict, since it depends on how much syrup the fruit takes up and how far it is dried. The figs must be dry to the touch and pliable, not tacky. Store in an airtight box in a cool, dry place, and refrigerate if there is any doubt about how well they dried.
Tomato figs were a minor craze in American cookery from roughly the 1830s and 1840s onward, appearing again and again in farm journals, almanacs and household manuals — often reprinted from a widely circulated account credited to a Southern gardener, though the trail is traditional rather than documented. The point was frugality and novelty at once: real figs were an imported luxury in most of the country, and a glut of ripe tomatoes could be turned into something that looked, kept and ate much like them, packed in sugar for the winter. In its earliest years the recipe may also belong to the long campaign to persuade wary cooks that the tomato was worth growing at all; sweetening it into a confection made a strange fruit familiar. That this appears in a book on vegetables is itself a period detail — the tomato was sorted with the garden crops on the plate, whatever the botanists said.