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Spiced Tomatoes
For two pounds of ripe tomatoes allow one pound of brown sugar, one-half pint of cider vinegar and one-fourth of an ounce each of cinnamon and cloves. Put all these ingredients into a pan and allow them to simmer slowly at the side of the fire until the tomatoes are cooked. When ready take the tomatoes out and put them on a dish, leaving the syrup to go on simmering. When the tomatoes are quite cold return them to the syrup and boil gently for ten minutes longer. Afterwards put them in jars, allow the syrup to keep on boiling until well reduced, then move it from the fire and let it get cold. Pour the cold syrup over the tomatoes, cover the jars with parchment, tie them down tightly and keep them in a dry store-cupboard.
This is a sweet spiced tomato preserve intended for long ambient storage, and the method for getting it there is the part that no longer stands up. The reading notes below are for understanding the recipe, not for following it.
- Why this one fails: no heat at the point of sealingThe syrup is deliberately cooled before it goes over the tomatoes, and the jars are then closed cold. Nothing about the filled, closed jar is ever brought to a temperature that kills what has settled in it during the transfers, and the fruit itself has been out on an open dish long enough to come to room temperature.
- Parchment is not a sealParchment tied down with string keeps dust and insects out and slows evaporation. It is gas-permeable and not hermetic, so the contents remain in contact with room air for the life of the jar. Everything about the recipe's safety rests on sugar concentration and acid alone.
- Tomatoes are the wrong fruit to gamble onRipe tomatoes sit close to pH 4.6, the line above which Clostridium botulinum can grow in a sealed, low-oxygen environment. Modern tomato canning always specifies added acid in a measured amount per jar for exactly this reason. Half a pint of cider vinegar of unstated strength, spread across two pounds of fruit and a pound of sugar, is not a measured acidification.
- The syrup reduction is undefined"Until well reduced" is the only control on the finished sugar concentration, and sugar concentration is what would otherwise hold spoilage organisms in check. Without a target temperature or a refractometer reading, two cooks working from this page will produce preserves of quite different keeping quality.
- Store-cupboard storageA dry cupboard in a 1896 hotel or town house was cooler than most modern heated homes. Even the marginal protection the original relied on is weaker at 68-72F than it was in an unheated pantry.
- Reading the measuresOne-half pint, in an American book of this date, is one cup. A quarter ounce of cinnamon and of cloves is roughly two to three teaspoons of each if ground, considerably more in volume if whole; the original does not say which. "At the side of the fire" means a bare simmer at the cooler edge of the range, not a boil.
- If you want the dishSweet spiced tomatoes are worth eating, but use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give you an acid addition per jar and a processing time. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a fat compendium that ranges from hotel service dishes to plain domestic preserving of just this kind. Spiced or sweet-pickled tomatoes were a fixture of American and English preserve shelves through the second half of the nineteenth century, when the tomato had finally shed its long reputation for unwholesomeness and cooks were putting up everything from tomato figs to tomato catsup. The dish belongs to the sugar-and-vinegar family of "sweet pickles" served in small quantities alongside cold roast meats, ham and game, where its job was the same as that of a chutney or a spiced peach. The double cooking, with the fruit lifted out and cooled while the syrup goes on reducing, is a standard preserver's trick of the period for keeping fruit whole rather than letting it collapse into jam, and it survives in modern candied and glacé fruit work.