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Preserved Ripe Tomatoes
Prepare in same manner as Preserved Green Tomatoes, except that the tomatoes must have skins removed before slicing them. 4 pounds peaches 2 cups water
This entry is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe, and what survives on the page cannot be followed to a safe sealed jar.
- The recipe is not hereThe method lives in the entry for Preserved Green Tomatoes, which this line only points to. Read on its own it gives no quantities for the tomatoes at all.
- The stray peach line"4 pounds peaches 2 cups water" appears to be a fragment carried over from an adjacent entry rather than part of the tomato preserve, and should not be treated as its ingredient list.
- Low-acid fruit in a sealed jarRipe tomatoes sit close to pH 4.6, the line below which Clostridium botulinum can grow in an anaerobic jar. Modern tested recipes for home-canned tomatoes call for added citric acid or bottled lemon juice for exactly this reason, and this book specifies none.
- No processing stepNothing on this page gives a boiling-water or pressure process, no time and no temperature, so from this entry alone there is no way to know the jars were heated enough to be shelf-stable.
- Skinning is the one instruction it does giveThe ripe fruit must be skinned before slicing, where the green version is evidently sliced skin and all. That difference is the whole substance of the entry.
- If you want to make itUse a current tested recipe for tomato preserves or tomato jam from a food-safety authority, with its stated acidification and processing time.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many books published by food firms as advertising. Sweet tomato preserves were a standard American nineteenth-century sweetmeat: the tomato was treated as a fruit, cooked down in heavy sugar syrup with lemon or ginger and served like a conserve rather than a relish. Both green and ripe tomatoes were used, and here the ripe version is written as a short variation on the green one. Compressed entries like this one are a reminder that early-twentieth-century preserving instructions assumed a cook who already knew the method and needed only the differences.