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Green-Tomato Preserve
8 pounds green tomatoes
1 tablespoon preserved ginger
6 lemons
6 pounds sugar
Wash the tomatoes, remove any dark parts about the stems, and weigh them. Cover them with boiling water, let them stand five minutes, drain and slice them into a preserving-kettle, placing a layer of the tomatoes, then a layer of sliced lemon, then the sugar with the ginger sprinkled over it. Let the mixture stand overnight. Drain and boil the sirup for ten minutes. Skim, add the tomatoes and cook rapidly until they are clear. Pour into clean, hot jars and seal.
A late-season sweet preserve that treats green tomatoes as fruit. The only real technique is patience: an overnight maceration draws the syrup out, and the fruit is cooked in that syrup rather than in added water.
- Seal properly"Pour into clean, hot jars and seal" is open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered a reliable seal. Fill hot sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath following current tested guidance for your jar size and altitude.
- Preserving-kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan; for a batch this size you want well over 8 quarts of capacity. Width matters more than depth, since the syrup has to reduce fast without scorching.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger candied in syrup, sold in jars or in crystallized form. A tablespoon of it, minced, is what the recipe wants; if substituting fresh ginger, use about a teaspoon grated, as it is sharper and lacks the sugar.
- Weigh after trimmingThe instruction to weigh the tomatoes after washing and cutting away the stem ends is deliberate — the sugar is calculated at three parts fruit to a little over two parts sugar by weight. Keep that ratio if you scale the batch.
- The lemonsSlice them paper-thin, peel and all, and pick out the seeds. Six lemons in 8 pounds of fruit is a great deal of rind; the bitterness is the point, but thick slices stay tough in the finished jar.
- Overnight macerationCover and leave at cool room temperature or refrigerate. In the morning there will be a substantial pool of liquid; that drained liquid is the "sirup" to be boiled ten minutes before the fruit goes back in.
- "Until they are clear"The tomato slices turn translucent as they cook. Cook rapidly as directed and stir near the end, when the syrup thickens and is likelier to catch.
- YieldAbout 6 to 7 pint jars. Serve it as you would a chutney or a marmalade: with sharp cheese, cold ham, or on toast.
Green-tomato preserves belong to the thrift end of American preserving: when frost threatened, the unripe fruit still on the vines was too plentiful to waste and too firm and tart to eat as a vegetable, so it went into the sugar kettle. Nineteenth-century cooks treated the tomato as a fruit for preserving purposes quite readily -- tomato figs, tomato marmalade and tomato butter all appear in household manuals of the period -- and lemon and ginger were common flavorings, supplying the aromatic lift and the acidity that the tomato itself lacks.