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Spiced Tomato Preserves
3 cupfuls drained tomato pulp (fresh or canned) 1 cupful tomato juice 1 package Pexel A Pexel Recipe.
Juice of one lemon Cloves, cinnamon, etc., to suit taste Warm and crush tomatoes and drain in a colander, (Simply drain canned tomatoes). Place one cup of the juice and juice of a lemon in preserving kettle and slowly add one package of Pexel, stirring constantly. Stir until Pexel is dissolved. Add 3 cupfuls of drained pulp; heat to a vigorous boil. Add 5 cupfuls of sugar and heat again to boiling. Boil 10 to 15 minutes, until desired consistency. Add clove, cinnamon and salt to taste. Pour and seal hot. A chopped green pepper may be added when adding tomato pulp, if desired.
A Pexel Recipe.
A brand-sponsored pectin recipe of the sort that circulated on leaflets and got copied straight into church cookbooks. The one thing to sort out before starting is what to use in place of Pexel.
- PexelA commercial powdered fruit pectin sold in single-batch packages in the 1920s and 1930s, long discontinued. A standard box of powdered pectin (about 1.75 oz) is the closest equivalent, but formulations and sugar ratios differ between brands, so check the ratio on the package you buy rather than assuming this recipe's 5 cups of sugar is right for it.
- Order of operationsPowdered pectin is dissolved in the cold or warm liquid first, before the sugar, exactly as written here. That part still holds. Sugar added too early keeps the pectin from hydrating and you get a syrup that never sets.
- Tomato pulpWarming and crushing the tomatoes releases the loose juice; the drained solids are what give the preserve body. Save the drained liquid, since you need a cup of it back for the pectin. Three cups of drained pulp takes roughly 3 to 4 lb of fresh ripe tomatoes.
- The lemon juice is not optionalTomatoes sit right at the edge of the acidity that pectin needs to gel, and their acidity varies with variety and ripeness. Bottled lemon juice is more consistent in acidity than a fresh lemon of unknown size.
- Boiling timeTen to fifteen minutes of hard boiling is much longer than a modern powdered-pectin jam, which is usually boiled one minute after the sugar goes in. The long boil here is doing the work of reducing watery tomato pulp; expect a thick, dark, almost chutney-like preserve rather than a bright jam.
- SpicesGround cloves and cinnamon go in at the end so they do not turn bitter or muddy the colour. Whole spices tied in cheesecloth and simmered with the pulp give a cleaner flavour and can be pulled before jarring. Cloves are aggressive here; a quarter teaspoon ground is plenty for this quantity.
- Sealing"Pour and seal hot" is open-kettle canning, in which the hot preserve was expected to sterilise the jar and pull its own seal. This is no longer considered a safe method for shelf storage, whatever the sugar content. Follow current boiling-water-bath guidance for tomato preserves, or treat the batch as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- YieldThe original gives none, and the finished volume will depend on how far the batch is boiled down.
Pexel was one of several commercial powdered fruit pectins that appeared in American kitchens after the First World War, when manufacturers began extracting and selling the setting agent that cooks had previously coaxed out of apples, quinces and currants. The line "A Pexel Recipe," printed twice in a recipe barely a hundred words long, is the tell: these formulas came off leaflets tucked into the package or handed out by grocers, and home cooks copied them verbatim into community cookbooks like this one, brand name and all. Pectin is generally reported to have been marketed in the United States from the late 1910s by the Douglas Pectin Corporation, whose liquid product Certo outlived most of its competitors. Spiced tomato preserves themselves are older than the packaged pectin by a long way, belonging to the nineteenth-century habit of treating the tomato as a fruit and putting it up with sugar, cloves and cinnamon for the breakfast table; the pectin package simply removed the guesswork about whether it would set.