Tomato Pickle
1/2 oz. of cloves, INGREDIENTS. - 24 small and perfectly ripe tomatoes, 1 quart of vinegar, 4 small onions, 1 oz. of pepper, ½ oz. of cloves, 1/2 oz. of celery-seed, 2 spoonfuls of mustard-seed, salt. AVERAGE COST, 3s.
Prick the tomatoes and lay them in an earthen jar with a little salt sprinkled between the layers, and let them stand for 3 days covered, draining away the juice into another covered jar. Mince the onions, then boil them in the vinegar with the other ingredients. Wash and dry the tomatoes, put them in a jar, pour over the juice from the other jar and the vinegar and other ingredients when cold, then cover and tie down closely.
TIME. A fortnight, before the pickle is ready.
SEASONABLE.--Make this in September or October.
Tomato Sauce (for Keeping; Excellent). INGREDIENTS. - To every quart of tomato pulp allow 1 pint of cayenne vinegar, oz. of shalots, oz. of garlic, peeled and cut in slices; salt to taste. To every 6 quarts of liquor, 1 pint of soy, 1 pint of anchovy sauce.
Gather the tomatoes quite ripe; bake them in a slow oven till tender; rub them through a sieve, and to every quart of pulp add cayenne vinegar, shalots, garlic and salt, in the above proportion; boil the whole together till the garlic and shalots are quite soft; then rub it through a sieve, put it again into a saucepan, and, to every six quarts of the liquor, add 1 pint of soy and the same quantity of anchovysauce, and boil altogether for about 20 minutes; bottle off for use, and carefully seal or resin the corks. This will keep good for 2 or 3 years.
THE TOMATO. small quantity of cayenne may be substituted for this).
Choose ripe tomatoes, put them into a stone jar and stand them in a cool oven until quite tender; when cold, take the skins and stalks from them, mix the pulp with the liquor which is in the jar, but do not strain it; add all the other ingredients, mix well together, and put it into bottles and seal the corks.
TIME.-4 or 5 hours in a cool oven.
SEASONABLE from the middle of September to the end of October. Tomato Sauce (for Keeping;
Two preserving recipes run together here, and both are long-keeping preparations built on assumptions about acidity and sealing that no longer hold. The notes below explain what the text says and where it breaks down.
- The quantities are incompleteThe ingredient list reads "oz. of cloves", "oz. of celery-seed" and so on, with the fractions lost in printing. There is no way to recover whether Beeton meant a quarter, a half or a whole ounce, and in a preserve the salt and spice proportions are not decorative.
- Tomatoes are borderline-acidWhole tomatoes sit close to the pH 4.6 line that separates food safe for open-kettle preserving from food that will support Clostridium botulinum. The recipe also dilutes its quart of vinegar with the tomato juice drained off during the three-day salting, which is poured back over the fruit, so the finished acidity of the jar is unknown and unmeasured.
- Nothing is heated in the jarThe tomatoes are salted raw, washed, and covered with vinegar that has been boiled with the onions and spices but is added cold. The pickle itself is never brought to temperature, and the jar is only "tied down closely," so it is neither a processed conserve nor a refrigerated one. The three days in a covered earthen jar are the salting step, not a preservation step.
- The sauce claims a two-to-three-year shelf lifeTomato pulp baked in a slow oven, boiled twenty minutes, bottled and sealed with corks "sealed or resined" is open-kettle bottling. A pint of cayenne vinegar to every quart of pulp is a real acidification, but of unknown strength, and the soy and anchovy sauce add salt rather than acid; cork-and-resin is not an airtight seal. Any current tested recipe for tomato ketchup or sauce specifies measured added acid and a timed water-bath process; use one of those instead.
- Cayenne vinegarA Victorian store-cupboard item: vinegar steeped with cayenne pods, used where a modern cook would reach for hot sauce. Its strength varied entirely by household, which is another reason the acidity of the finished sauce cannot be estimated from the page.
- Soy and anchovy sauce"Soy" here is soy sauce, imported and expensive; "anchovy sauce" is a thin bottled fish condiment rather than the modern thick anchovy paste. Both are seasonings borrowed from the ketchup tradition rather than preservatives.
- Cost and season3s. was a serious outlay for a store-cupboard item in Beeton's day. September and October is still the right window for a tomato glut, and the underlying idea of a spiced tomato pickle is sound; only the method is obsolete.
Tomatoes reached British kitchens slowly. Still called love apples well into the nineteenth century and long suspected because of their nightshade kinship, they were grown under glass for the wealthy before market gardening made them common, which is why Beeton's tomato entries cluster around a short autumn season and carry a notable price. The two sauces here belong to the older English ketchup family rather than to anything a modern reader would call tomato ketchup: mushroom, walnut and oyster ketchups came first, and the tomato version inherited their supporting cast of soy, anchovy, shallot and garlic, all pungent, salty and meant to be shaken over a chop by the spoonful rather than squeezed onto chips. The instruction to bake the fruit in a slow oven before sieving is the same principle behind a modern slow-roasted tomato passata, driving off water and concentrating flavour before the pulp is boiled down -- though the four-or-five-hour timing on this page belongs to the third, fragmentary recipe rather than to the sauce being discussed. Sealing corks with resin was one common domestic answer to bottling before reliable screw-top glass and the home water-bath were widely understood.