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Green Tomato Mincemeat (Gal ground green tomatoes lbs)
1 gal. ground green tomatoes 2 lbs. brown sugar A few apples 1 C cider vinegar 1 C chopped beef suet 1 t salt 1 t cinnamon 1 t cloves 1 t nutmeg 1 t allspice Cook slowly, after coming to a boil, until the tomatoes look transparent. Seal at once. Rowena M. Nutt.
This is an open-kettle canning recipe, and that is the problem with it. The ingredients are ordinary; the preservation method is not one that can be recommended, and no adjustment of times or temperatures in a home kitchen makes it sound.
- "Seal at once" is open-kettle canningPouring hot food into jars and capping them relies on the escaping steam to pull a seal, with no processing after the lid goes on. The jar rim, the lid and the headspace air are never sterilised, and the seal itself often fails weeks later. This practice was abandoned by extension services decades ago for anything but high-sugar jellies, and even there it is discouraged.
- The acidity is not controlledOne cup of cider vinegar to a gallon of ground tomatoes plus two pounds of sugar and apples is far too little, and too vaguely specified, to guarantee the pH below 4.6 that a boiling-water process depends on. Green tomatoes are more acid than ripe ones but still sit near the line, and "a few apples" gives no way to calculate anything.
- Suet puts it out of range entirelyA cup of chopped beef suet makes this a meat product. Fat insulates spores from heat and, combined with a low-acid mixture in a sealed anaerobic jar, this is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum. Tested modern mincemeat recipes containing meat or suet do exist, but they specify measured acid and a stated processing time, neither of which this recipe supplies.
- "Until the tomatoes look transparent" is not a processIt is a reasonable visual cue for doneness of texture and it says nothing about whether the contents of a sealed jar have reached a lethal temperature. Cooking in the kettle does not substitute for processing in the jar.
- What the quantities mean, for the recordA gallon of ground green tomatoes is roughly 8 lb of fruit. The recipe gives no yield; a batch this size would have filled several pints. C is cup, t is teaspoon.
- If you want the dishUse a current tested recipe for green tomato mincemeat, with measured vinegar or lemon juice and a stated processing time, or make the mixture and refrigerate or freeze it rather than sealing it.
Green tomato mincemeat belongs to the frost-night economy of the kitchen garden: when the first hard freeze was forecast, whatever was still hard and green came indoors, and the cook found uses for it. Spiced with the standard mincemeat quartet of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice, sweetened with brown sugar and sharpened with cider vinegar, ground tomatoes stand in for the apples and dried fruit of a proper mincemeat, and the cup of suet keeps the link to the meat-based original, which in Britain and colonial America genuinely contained chopped beef or tongue. By the late nineteenth century "mock" and meatless mincemeats were common in American cookbooks, and church and ladies'-aid collections like this one printed them under a contributor's name — here Rowena M. Nutt.