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Green Tomato Mincemeat (Piece of suet twice size)
4 C chopped green tomatoes Piece of suet twice size of an egg, chopped Piece of suet twice size of an 4 C brown sugar (light) egg, chopped 1 C vinegar 1 t cloves 8 large apples, chopped fine 1 t cinnamon 2 C raisins 1 t allspice 1 t salt Drain juice off tomatoes and add as much water as there was juice. Add other ingredients and cook for one hour and can. Emma G. Smith,
The ingredient list in this book was set in two narrow columns and has run together, so read it as a list rather than a sentence. Beyond the typography, this is a preserving recipe with no processing instructions, and that is where it fails.
- Untangling the columnsThe ingredients are: a piece of suet twice the size of an egg, chopped; 8 large apples, chopped fine; 2 cups raisins; 4 cups light brown sugar; 1 cup vinegar; 1 teaspoon each cloves, cinnamon, allspice; 1 teaspoon salt. The abbreviations C and t are cup and teaspoon.
- The green tomatoes are missingDespite the title, no quantity of tomatoes appears anywhere in the text — only the instruction to drain their juice. Other printed green tomato mincemeats generally call for a large bulk quantity of chopped green tomatoes, often measured by the peck, but the amount intended here is genuinely unknowable.
- Why "can" is not enoughThe whole instruction for preservation is "cook for one hour and can." There is no jar preparation, no headspace, no processing method and no time. Open-kettle filling of hot jars, which is what this appears to mean, was common practice in the period and is no longer considered a safe seal.
- Suet makes it low-acidRendered beef fat coats food particles and slows heat penetration, and it adds to the low-acid load working against the vinegar and tomatoes. A suet mincemeat is not safely preserved by an unspecified boil-and-seal: tested recipes for meat-containing mincemeat specify measured acid, jar size and a processing time, and without those Clostridium botulinum spores can survive in a sealed, oxygen-free jar.
- Green tomatoes are not reliably acidicTomatoes sit close to the pH boundary that divides safe boiling-water canning from unsafe, and the figure varies by variety and ripeness. One cup of vinegar against an unstated volume of fruit is not a measured acidification.
- If you want to make itUse a current tested green tomato mincemeat recipe with stated jar sizes, added acid and a processing schedule. Historic mincemeats of this type are also perfectly good cooked and refrigerated for a week, or frozen, rather than shelf-stored.
Green tomato mincemeat is a thrift recipe: it appears in American community cookbooks wherever gardeners faced a first frost and a vine still loaded with fruit that would never ripen. The trick is that green tomatoes, chopped and cooked long with sugar, vinegar, raisins and warming spices, take on the dark sweet-sour character of a fruit mincemeat, and the suet supplies the richness that beef and beef fat gave the older English original. By the late nineteenth century "mincemeat" had already drifted a long way from minced meat, and meatless or nearly meatless versions were common enough to pass without comment.