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Tomato Honey (Select ripe yellow tomatoes)
Select ripe yellow tomatoes, weigh them, cut them into pieces, and put in a porcelain kettle, and for each pound add the grated yellow rind of one lemon; simmer gently for thirty minutes, then drain, and press gently through a cheese cloth. Measure the liquor and return it to the kettle, and for each pint add one pound of granulated sugar and four tablespoonfuls of lemon juice. Boil twenty or thirty minutes until a jelly-like syrup is formed. Put in bottles or tumblers for keeping.
A clear tomato jelly meant to be poured over biscuits or toast like honey. The method is straightforward jelly-making, with two details that decide whether it sets.
- Yellow tomatoes matterThe point is a pale golden syrup, so red tomatoes give a muddy pinkish result and a stronger tomato flavour. Yellow or orange heirloom slicers work; small yellow cherry tomatoes are fine and need only halving.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-lined pan, not stoneware. Uncoated aluminium or bare cast iron will react with the acid and dull both the colour and the flavour; stainless steel is a fine substitute.
- Zest, not peel"Grated yellow rind" means only the coloured outer layer. Any white pith carried in with it can make the finished syrup bitter.
- Sugar ratio and setOne pound of sugar per pint of liquor is about two and a quarter cups sugar to two cups juice. Tomatoes are low in pectin, so the set comes largely from concentration. Boil to 220F on a thermometer, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer; twenty to thirty minutes is a guide, not a guarantee.
- SkimSkim the foam that rises in the last minutes of boiling, or the bottled syrup will be cloudy at the top.
- Storage"Bottles or tumblers for keeping" describes open-kettle filling, which was normal practice at the time and is no longer considered a seal. Treat it as a refrigerator preserve, good a month or so, or process filled half-pint jars in a boiling-water bath following current canning directions.
Preserves called "honey" were a nineteenth-century convention for any clear, thick, pale syrup eaten the way honey was eaten, and the name promised a texture rather than a bee. Apple honey, melon honey and tomato honey all appear in American household books of the period, generally in the season when fruit was abundant and cheap. Yellow tomatoes were widely grown in kitchen gardens then and were considered milder and better suited to sweet uses than red ones, and they are botanically a fruit. The lemon rind and juice here supply the acid that helps a low-pectin fruit thicken, and may well soften the vegetal note as well. Its appearance in a vegetable cookery book reflects the era's interest in extending the garden's output across the whole table, sweet courses included.