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Preserved Yellow Tomatoes
4 pounds small yellow tomatoes 3 pounds sugar 1/2 cup boiling water Juice and rind of 1 lemon Wash and dry the tomatoes and prick each one in five or six places. Stir the sugar in the water until dissolved; add the tomatoes and cook until clear. When half done add the lemon juice and the rind sliced very thin. When the fruit is clear, remove it with a skimmer; put in small jars, filling them twothirds full. Boil the syrup fast for a few minutes longer or until thick and syrupy; fill up the jars; cover with a cloth until the next day; then cover closely and stand away in a cool place. 3 navel oranges
A sugar preserve rather than a plain canned tomato: the fruit is candied in heavy syrup, so the syrup does most of the preserving work. Two things in the original need attention — the finishing step, and a stray line that belongs to the next recipe.
- The stray last line"3 navel oranges" is not part of this recipe. It appears to be an ingredient line belonging to whatever recipe followed. Ignore it.
- The tomatoes"Small yellow tomatoes" means the yellow pear or yellow plum types — firm, low-juice, about an inch long. Modern yellow cherry tomatoes work but are thinner-walled and will slump; pick the firmest and least ripe of the batch, since underripe fruit holds its shape through a long boil.
- Pricking is not optionalThe five or six punctures let syrup in and steam out. Skip them and the skins burst raggedly and the interiors stay watery instead of turning translucent.
- "Cook until clear"This is the hinge. The fruit is done when it looks glassy all the way through rather than opaque; judge by appearance rather than the clock, as the recipe intends. Keep the heat low; a hard boil at this stage shreds the tomatoes before the sugar has penetrated.
- Thick and syrupyAfter the fruit is lifted out, the syrup needs to reach jam consistency — around 220F on a candy thermometer, or the point where it sheets off a cold spoon. Undercooked syrup is what makes these preserves ferment or weep in the jar.
- The cloth, and what it is notCovering with a cloth overnight simply lets the jars cool and the fruit settle into the syrup; it is not a seal, and "cover closely and stand away in a cool place" reflects a pantry-and-paraffin era. Fill clean hot half-pint jars, then process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes and check the seals, or treat the whole batch as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a month.
- YieldThe original's two-thirds-full instruction is deliberate: it leaves room for the reduced syrup to be poured over.
Preserving tomatoes with sugar and lemon as though they were apricots was ordinary practice through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, and yellow varieties were often chosen for it: they are traditionally said to be less acid, they hold their shape, and they candy to a clear amber that looks like fruit rather than sauce. American and British cookbooks of the period often file tomato preserves, tomato figs and green tomato sweet pickles beside the peach and quince, a reminder that the tomato's place as a vegetable is a matter of custom rather than botany EDIT a point the U.S. Supreme Court settled for tariff purposes in 1893 while conceding the fruit was, botanically, a fruit. Mrs. Fryer's book, published in the early twentieth century with each recipe on its own removable leaf, belongs to a generation of household manuals that assumed a summer's canning was done at home from whatever the garden gave in quantity, yellow pear tomatoes included.