Home › Preserves › Tomato Preserves
Tomato Preserves
Scald and peel carefully small perfectly-formed tomatoes, not too ripe (yellow pear-shaped are best), prick with a needle to prevent bursting, add an equal amount of sugar by weight, let lie over night, then pour off all juice into a preserving-kettle, and boil until it is a thick syrup, clarifying with white of an egg; add tomatoes and boil carefully until they look transparent. A piece or two of root-ginger, or one lemon to a pound of fruit sliced thin and cooked with the fruit, may be added.
A 19th-century sugar-weight preserve that treats the tomato as the fruit it botanically is. The technique is sound; only the vessels, the egg-white clarifying and the storage need translating.
- Which tomatoesYellow pear or small red cherry tomatoes, picked slightly underripe so the walls hold. Full-ripe fruit collapses into pulp during the second boil and you lose the whole point, which is whole translucent tomatoes suspended in syrup.
- Equal sugar by weightWeigh the peeled fruit and match it gram for gram — roughly 2 lb tomatoes to 2 lb sugar, about 4 1/2 cups. This is a preserving ratio rather than a matter of taste; cutting it back gives a looser syrup that keeps less well.
- The overnight stepSugar draws the juice out by osmosis; there is nothing to do but cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature. In hot weather refrigerate it. Next morning you should have a good pool of thin liquid to pour off.
- Preserving-kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled cast iron. Width matters more than depth because evaporation is the whole mechanism. Untinned copper or bare iron will react with the acid.
- Clarifying with white of an eggAn old method for lifting scum: whisk one white into the cold syrup, bring it up to a boil, and the coagulating albumen carries the cloudiness to the surface to be skimmed off. Skip it if you like and simply skim carefully; it affects clarity, not safety or set.
- Boil until thick syrupReduce the drained juice alone to about 220-222F on a thermometer, or until a spoonful sheets rather than runs. Doing this before the fruit goes in is why the tomatoes stay whole.
- The hingeOnce the tomatoes are added, keep the pan at a bare simmer and move them by swirling rather than stirring, until they go translucent — probably somewhere in the range of ten to twenty minutes; a hard rolling boil risks splitting them despite the needle pricks.
- Ginger and lemon'Root ginger' in books of this period may mean the dried whole root as much as the fresh rhizome; a knob or two of fresh ginger, fished out at the end, works well. One thinly sliced lemon per pound of fruit adds a good deal of acid and pectin, which should firm the set as well as brighten the flavour.
- Yield and keepingAbout 2 lb of tomatoes gives roughly three to four half-pint jars. The book assumes a cool larder; treat it as a refrigerator preserve, good for several weeks, or use a current tested water-bath process for tomato preserves if you want it shelf-stable, since tomatoes are borderline in acidity.
Tomato preserves belong to a period when the tomato's place in American kitchens was still unsettled, and sweetening it in sugar syrup was one way of settling the question — if it behaved like a fruit, preserve it like one. The yellow pear-shaped varieties the recipe prefers were widely grown in 19th-century gardens, their firm, small fruits suiting preserving and pickling better than the large ribbed slicing tomatoes of the day. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) sits in the era of the sugar-heavy household preserve closet, when a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit was standard insurance against spoilage; egg-white clarifying was long used in confectioners' and sugar-refining practice as well as in the domestic preserve kettle.