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Preserved Green Tomatoes
4 quarts green tomatoes 4 pounds sugar 4 lemons 1 inch ginger root ½ cup cold water Wash tomatoes and cut in slices; add sliced lemons, sugar, water and ginger root. Simmer two hours, cool, then simmer two hours more. Pour into jars and seal.
A late-season sweet preserve of the old school: fruit and sugar cooked down in two long sessions, with lemon and ginger doing the aromatic work. A few of its assumptions no longer hold.
- The hinge: two simmers, not oneCooling between the two sessions lets the sugar draw into the tomato slices, which helps them hold their shape rather than break down. Interrupted boiling of this kind is a common feature of long preserving schedules, though the recipe itself gives no reason for it.
- What "simmer" means hereBarely moving liquid, around 195-205F, uncovered, with occasional stirring. A rolling boil over four hours will caramelize the sugar and scorch the bottom. Use a wide, heavy preserving pan so evaporation happens across the surface.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of sliced green tomatoes runs somewhere in the region of six to eight pounds, so four pounds of sugar is rather less than the pound-for-pound ratio often cited in 19th-century preserving. The half cup of water is only there to keep things from catching before the tomatoes release their juice.
- The lemonsSlice them thin and use peel, pith and flesh, but pick out the seeds; they turn bitter over four hours of cooking. The lemon adds acid as well as flavour, alongside the acidity of the green fruit itself; do not reduce it.
- Ginger rootAn inch of fresh root, peeled and left in one or two pieces so it can be fished out at the end. Some cooks of the period used dried whole ginger tied in muslin; if you substitute, use a piece about the size of a thumbnail, and do not use ground ginger, which will muddy the syrup.
- Open-kettle sealing is obsolete"Pour into jars and seal" describes open-kettle canning: filling sterilized jars with hot preserve and relying on the heat to seal them, standard practice when this book was written. Current practice is to process filled jars in a boiling-water bath; consult a tested modern preserving guide for the time appropriate to your jar size, or simply refrigerate the finished preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- Yield and useThis is a large batch, and the finished quantity depends on how far the syrup reduces. It is served the way a chunky marmalade is served: with toast and butter, with cold ham or roast pork, or alongside a cheese course.
Preserves made from unripe tomatoes were a standard piece of American household economy: when the first frost was forecast, the vines still carried pounds of green fruit that would never ripen, and the choice was pickle them, mince them into pie, or candy them in sugar. Because the tomato was botanically a fruit and behaved like one in a kettle, sweet green tomato preserves appear in cookbooks throughout the second half of the 19th century, usually with lemon and ginger for exactly the reason they appear here: a green tomato has almost no flavor of its own and takes on whatever it is cooked with. Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer; like several confectioners' cookbooks of the era it promoted the firm's products through a chocolate chapter but otherwise served as a complete general household manual, preserving chapter included.