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Green Tomato Preserve
One peck of green tomatoes; six pounds of sugar; six lemons; one tablespoon of ginger; onehalf pint of water. Wash the tomatoes, remove any dark crust about the stems and weigh them. Cover them with boiling water, let them stand five minutes, then drain them and cut them into slices-slicing them into the preserving-kettle, placing in a layer of the vegetable, then a layer of the sliced lemon, then the sugar with the ginger sprinkled over. Add the water, cover the kettle and cook very slowly one hour and a half. Skim off whatever scum rises in boiling. When boiling this length of time remove the kettle from the fire and set aside to cool. When perfectly cool, return it to the fire and simmer gently for another hour. Put up in jars, and set in a cool place.
A classic two-stage open-kettle preserve of the sort that filled late-Victorian storerooms. The proportions are readable, but the finishing instruction — jars filled and set in a cool place, with no seal and no processing — is the part that no longer holds.
- Why it fails todayThe recipe ends with "put up in jars, and set in a cool place." There is no sealing method, no boiling-water bath, no processing time and no temperature. Open-kettle filling relies on hot syrup to sterilise the jar and pull a vacuum, which it does inconsistently; jars that fail to seal spoil quietly.
- The acid and sugar are both borderlineTomatoes, green or ripe, sit near the pH line that separates safely acidified foods from low-acid ones, which is why modern tomato canning directions always specify added lemon juice or citric acid by measured amount. Six pounds of sugar to roughly twelve of tomatoes gives a syrup far below the concentration that preserves by sugar alone. Use a current tested green tomato preserve recipe instead.
- A peckA peck is a quarter bushel — about 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. The recipe directs the cook to weigh them after trimming, though it never says what the weight is for; the sugar quantity is given as a fixed six pounds.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. It is only there to keep the sugar from catching before the tomatoes give up their own liquid.
- The ginger is ambiguousA tablespoon is a large amount of dried ground ginger and a small amount of bruised fresh root. Books of this period used "ginger" for either; sprinkled dry over sugar in layers, ground is the likelier reading.
- Preserving-kettleA wide, shallow, heavy pan, chosen for fast evaporation rather than depth; such pans were made in copper and brass, though porcelain-lined and enamelled ware was also common in American kitchens by this date. A broad stainless or enamelled pot is the equivalent. Never leave an acid preserve standing in bare copper or brass.
- The rest between cookingsCooling the pan completely and returning it to the fire is a standard preserving technique; the recipe says only 'when perfectly cool,' not overnight. The rest is generally held to let the slices take up syrup, which helps keep them whole and translucent rather than collapsing to pulp.
- LemonsSix lemons sliced whole means peel, pith and pips all go in. Pick out the seeds as you slice; they turn bitter over a two-and-a-half-hour cook.
Green tomato preserves belong to the end-of-season economy that shaped most of the canning chapters in books like this one: frost is coming, the vines are full of fruit that will never ripen, and nothing is thrown away. Treating an unripe vegetable as if it were fruit — layered with sugar, lemon and a warm spice, then cooked twice — follows the same logic that produced watermelon-rind pickle, marrow jam and citron preserve, all of which lean on sugar and a citrus note to give a bland flesh definition. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book to the same audience of home managers, and its preserving section reflects the standard American practice of the day: long slow boiling, careful skimming, and jars sealed by whatever means the household had. Reliable home canning guidance with tested processing times did not become widely available until the agricultural extension bulletins of the following decades, which is precisely the gap this recipe sits in.