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Yellow Tomato Marmalade
Scald and skin a half peck of yellow tomatoes, large or small, put them in a porcelain kettle, cook thirty minutes, then add an equal quantity of grated pineapple. Weigh or measure and to each pound allow one pound of granulated sugar. Cook slowly one hour, put into tumblers or jars and when cool tie as directed.
A straightforward two-fruit preserve, but the measurements are given in dry measure and the sealing instructions belong to an era of paper-and-paraffin covers. Both need translating.
- Half a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts — roughly 6 lb of tomatoes before skinning, which will cook down considerably. Expect about 5 lb of prepared fruit.
- "An equal quantity"The original is genuinely ambiguous as to whether the pineapple is matched by weight or by volume; the following sentence ("weigh or measure") suggests the author was indifferent. Matching by weight gives a firmer, less watery result.
- Sugar ratioOne pound of granulated sugar per pound of combined cooked fruit — a true 1:1 marmalade. This is what makes the preserve keep, and cutting it down will give you a loose sauce that spoils quickly.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or porcelain-lined pot. Use enamel or stainless steel; the acid in tomato and pineapple will pick up metallic flavours from bare aluminium or unlined copper.
- Grated pineappleFresh pineapple grated on a box grater, cores discarded. Canned crushed pineapple works if you drain off the syrup and reduce the added sugar slightly to compensate.
- Yellow tomatoesChosen for colour and for their milder, less sharp flavour rather than any special preserving quality. Yellow and orange varieties are often, though not reliably, lower in acid than red ones — colour is not a dependable guide to a tomato's pH — so the pineapple's acidity is doing useful work here.
- Cook slowly one hourJudge by set, not by the clock. Marmalade with no added pectin is done at about 220F, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed.
- "Tie as directed"This points to sealing directions given elsewhere in the book; for tumblers of the period that would ordinarily mean a paper cover or a paraffin seal, neither of which is now considered a safe shelf-stable closure. Treat the finished marmalade as a refrigerator preserve, or follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for tomato preserves.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks treated the tomato as freely as a fruit as a vegetable, and preserves were one of its commonest uses: tomato figs, tomato preserves, tomato butter and marmalades all appear in household manuals from the 1840s onward. Yellow-fruited varieties were widely grown and were often specified for sweet preserving, both because their colour suited a jar of marmalade and because their flavour was thought less sharp. The pineapple suggests a later recipe — by the closing decades of the century steamship and rail transport from the Caribbean and Florida had made fresh pineapple a reliable, if still faintly luxurious, ingredient in northern kitchens, and cooks used it much as they used lemon, for acid and perfume.