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Bottled Tomatoes
Cut off the stems and green parts from four or five pounds of ripe tomatoes, divide them into small pieces, put them into a stewpan with two onions, two bay-leaves, three or four cloves, and pepper and salt to taste. Boil them, stirring at the same time until tender, then turn the pulp onto a fine sieve with a basin underneath to catch the liquor as it runs through. When all the juice has drained from the tomatoes put it in the stewpan, and boil until reduced to half its original quantity. Pass the pulp through a sieve, but do not allow the onions or bay-leaves to go through, and mix it with the reduced liquor. Turn the conserve into wide-mouthed bottles, cork them and tie them down. Place the bottles in a saucepan with some straw between them to prevent their breaking and cold water up to their necks, and boil them for thirty minutes or so. Afterward leave them in water off the fire until cold. Wipe them, dip their nozzles in bottle-wax, and place them in a dry store-cupboard for future use.
This is a home-canning procedure, and it is the part of the old repertoire that has aged worst. The seasoned tomato conserve itself is sound cooking; the preservation method behind it is not, and the finished bottles cannot be made safe by adjusting the timing.
- Botulism is the specific riskClostridium botulinum spores survive boiling water and germinate in sealed, oxygen-free, low-acid containers held at room temperature. A thirty-minute boil in a saucepan reaches only 212F, which kills yeasts and moulds but not spores.
- The onions are the reason it failsThe onions are the aggravating factor — Tomatoes sit near the pH 4.6 borderline that divides acid from low-acid canning. Onion is a low-acid vegetable, and two of them can lift the mixture over that line, where a boiling-water process is not sufficient. Current tomato canning recipes specify added bottled lemon juice or citric acid in measured amounts for exactly this reason.
- Corks do not sealA cork tied down and dipped in wax is a barrier, not a vacuum seal. It cannot be checked, it can weep, and wax cracks as the glass cools and contracts. There is no way to tell a failed bottle from a good one until it is opened.
- No temperature, no measure, no testNo temperature, no measure, no test — The instruction is "boil them for thirty minutes or so" with the water only to the necks of the bottles, so the tops are not submerged and heating is uneven. Nothing in the recipe is quantified in a way that could be verified.
- Cooling in the water is a further problemCooling in the water is a further problem — leaving the bottles in the pan off the fire brings them down slowly through the range in which surviving spores can germinate, and the bottles then sit at room temperature in a store-cupboard, which is where the real hazard lies.
- If you want bottled tomatoesUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority, which will give you acidification quantities and a pressure-canner schedule, or simply freeze the conserve. Do not scale this one up or extend the boil.
- Reading it as a recipe rather than a methodThe flavour base itself — four or five pounds of tomatoes cooked down with onion, bay and clove, pulp and reduced juice recombined — is a good tomato sauce, and the straining of the aromatics before they pass the sieve is the sensible instruction in the piece.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, and, as was often said of large American compilations of that decade, it appears to have borrowed freely from English household manuals; the bottling technique here — wide-mouthed bottles, straw packed between them to stop the glass knocking, wax over the nozzle — is straight out of the mid-Victorian preserving tradition rather than anything peculiar to a New York hotel kitchen. Commercial canned tomatoes were already widely sold in America by the 1890s, but hotel and household cooks who wanted a seasoned conserve rather than plain packed fruit may well have gone on putting it up themselves. The gap between this and modern practice is not a matter of taste but of knowledge: botulinum toxin was not identified until the 1890s in Europe, its link to home-canned low-acid food was not well understood in domestic kitchens until well into the twentieth century, and the tested processing schedules that govern canning today did not exist when Oscar wrote.