Excellent
INGREDIENTS. -3 dozen tomatoes; to every pound of tomato-pulp allow 1 pint of Chili vinegar, 1 oz. of garlic, 1 oz. of shalot, 2 oz. of salt, 1 large green capsicum, 1/2 teaspoonful of cayenne, 2 pickled gherkins, 6 pickled onions, 1 pint of common vinegar, and the juice of 6 lemons.
Choose the tomatoes when quite ripe and red; put them in a jar with a cover to it, and bake them till tender. The better way is to put them in the oven over-night, when it will not be too hot, and examine them in the morning to see if they are tender. Do not allow them to remain in the oven long enough to break them; but they should be sufficiently soft to skin nicely and rub through a sieve. Measure the pulp, and to each pound of pulp add the above proportion of vinegar and other ingredients, taking care to chop very fine the garlic, shalot, capsicum, onions and gherkins, Boil the whole together till everything is tender; then again rub it through a sieve, and add the lemon-juice. Now boil the whole again till it becomes as thick as cream, and keep continually stirring; bottle it when quite cold, cork well, and seal the corks.
TIME. In a cool oven one night.
SEASONABLE from the middle of September to the end of October. Note. A quantity of liquor will flow from the tomatoes, which must be put through the sieve with the rest. Keep it well stirred whilst on the fire, and use a wooden spoon.
Tomato Sauce, Hot (to serve with TIME. Ready for use in a week.
SEASONABLE. Make this from the middle Cutlets, Roast Meats, &c.). - INGREDIENTS of September to the end of October.
Tomato Sauce (for Keeping; Excellent). INGREDIENTS.-1 dozen tomatoes, 2 teaspoonsfuls of the best powdered ginger, 1 dessertspoonful of salt, 1 head of garlic chopped fine, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinefor 1 tureen.-6 tomatoes, 2 shalots, 1 clove, 1 blade of mace, salt and cayenne to taste, pint of gravy or stock. AVERAGE COST, 18.
Cut the tomatoes in two, and squeeze the juice and seeds out; put them in a stewpan with all the ingredients, and let them simmer gently until the tomatoes are tender TOMATOES, BAKED. enough to pulp; rub the whole through a sieve, boil it for a few minutes, and serve.
The shalots and spices may be omitted when their flavour is objected to.
TIME.-1 hour, or rather more, to simmer the tomatoes.
SEASONABLE in September and October.
Tomatoes, Baked. (Excellent.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-8 or 10 tomatoes, pepper and salt to taste, 2 oz. of butter, bread-crumbs. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Take off the stalks from the tomatoes; cut them into thick slices, and put them into a deep baking-dish; add a plentiful seasoning of pepper and salt, and butter in the above proportion; cover the whole with bread-crumbs; drop over these a little clarified butter; bake in a moderate oven from 20 minutes to 1/2 hour, and serve very hot. This vegetable, dressed as above, is an exceedingly nice accompaniment to all kinds of roast meat. The tomatoes, instead of being cut in slices, may be baked whole; but they will take rather a longer time to cook.
TIME.-20 minutes to 1/4 hour, SEASONABLE in August, September and October; but may be had, forced, much earlier.
Tomatoes, Baked. (Another Mode.) -INGREDIENTS. Some bread-crumbs, a little butter, onion, cayenne and salt.
Bake the tomatoes whole, then scoop out a small hole at the top; fry the breadcrumbs, onion, &c., and fill the holes with this as high up as possible; then brown the tomatoes with a salamander, or in an oven, and take care that the skin does not break.
Tomatoes and Onions. INGREDIENTS.-1 dozen ripe tomatoes, their weight in onions, a quart of vinegar, a teaspoonful of allspice, 2 oz. of black pepper. AVERAGE COST, 3s.
Wipe the tomatoes dry, and take off the skin of the onions, put them in a stewpan with the other ingredients, and let them gently simmer for 8 hours. When cold, bottle and tie over with a bladder.
TIME.-8 hours.
SEASONABLE. - Make this in autumn.
Several related tomato entries run together here: a long-keeping vinegar sauce, a hot tureen sauce made with stock, two versions of baked tomatoes, and a spiced tomato-and-onion preserve. The measures are imperial and the ovens are coal-fired, so a few conversions are needed before starting.
- The hinge: reduce to cream, and stirThe keeping sauce depends on being boiled down until it is as thick as cream, which drives off water and concentrates the vinegar and lemon juice. Stop short of that and it will be thin and keep less well; scorch it and the whole batch tastes burnt, which is why the original insists on constant stirring.
- Imperial pints and ouncesA Victorian British pint is 20 fl oz, not 16, so "1 pint of Chili vinegar" is 2 1/2 US cups. Ounces of garlic and shalot are weights: 1 oz of garlic is roughly 6-8 average cloves, 1 oz of shallot one large one.
- The overnight ovenThe original calls only for "a cool oven one night"; no temperature is given, and a cooling range would have dropped steadily through the night. In a modern oven, 250F for 2 to 3 hours in a covered dish gives the result described: skins slipping, flesh soft, fruit not collapsed.
- "Moderate oven" for the baked tomatoesRead this as 350F. Sliced tomatoes with crumbs and butter take 20-30 minutes at that heat; whole ones need 35-45 minutes, and the original is right that they take longer.
- SalamanderThe salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over food to brown it. Use the broiler, a few inches from the element, and watch it, since the crumb topping colours in a minute or two.
- Chili vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies for a week or two, then strained. Any hot pepper vinegar substitutes, or steep 6-8 dried chillies in 2 1/2 cups of cider or malt vinegar.
- VesselsUse stainless steel or enamel, never bare aluminium or cast iron; this much vinegar and lemon juice will pick up metal. The wooden spoon in the original is for the same reason.
- Storage, not shelf-life"Bottle it when quite cold, cork well, and seal the corks" and "tie over with a bladder" are Victorian answers to a problem we solve differently. Neither gives a hermetic seal, so treat both preserves as refrigerator condiments in clean screw-top jars and use them within a couple of months.
- Yield and costAverage costs of 1s. 6d. and 3s. are 1860s London prices and mean nothing now. The baked tomatoes serve 6 as a side.
Isabella Beeton's household book appeared in the early 1860s, at the moment the tomato was shifting in Britain from a suspect ornamental "love apple" to a kitchen garden crop, and her seasonable notes catch it mid-transition: September and October for the outdoor crop, "but may be had, forced, much earlier" from heated glasshouses. That short season is the reason so many of these entries are preserves rather than dishes. The keeping sauce belongs to the family of ketchups, a word usually traced into English from a Hokkien or Malay term for a fermented fish or shellfish sauce, and applied in Britain to any strained, spiced, bottled condiment, most often mushroom or walnut before tomato overtook them. Beeton also offers a hot tomato sauce thinned with gravy or stock, with the note that the shalots and spices "may be omitted when their flavour is objected to."