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Ripe Tomato Pickles
Mrs. C. M. Dickerman.
To seven pounds of ripe tomatoes add three pounds sugar, one quart vinegar, boil them together fifteen minutes, skim out the tomatoes and boil the syrup a few minutes longer. Spice to suit the taste with cloves and cinnamon.
A sweet spiced tomato preserve of the kind that stood between pickle and jam on a nineteenth-century table. The method is complete but compressed, and it leaves out two steps a modern cook will want spelled out.
- The missing stepAfter the syrup has boiled down, the tomatoes presumably go back into it; the recipe never says so. Skimming them out most likely keeps them from collapsing while the syrup thickens, so pour the hot syrup back over them before packing.
- Which tomatoesThe recipe does not say what size fruit to use. Small whole tomatoes hold their shape best; large slicing tomatoes will tend to disintegrate in fifteen minutes of boiling, so quarter and core them and expect a chunky conserve.
- SkinsSome period recipes for ripe tomato pickle direct that the fruit be scalded and skinned first; this one does not. Left on, the skins can toughen in the acid syrup and slide off unpleasantly in the jar.
- Spicing "to suit the taste"For this quantity, start with two tablespoons of whole cloves and three or four cinnamon sticks tied in a cloth bag, tasting as the syrup reduces. Ground spice will cloud the syrup and go gritty.
- The vinegarA quart of 5 percent cider vinegar is a reasonable modern stand-in; the recipe does not say which vinegar. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength, so do not reduce the amount on the assumption that it will be harsh -- the acid is doing preservative work as well as flavouring.
- How long to reduce"A few minutes longer" is short. Take the syrup to a light coating consistency, five to fifteen minutes depending on how watery the fruit was, then stop; boiled hard it will set like candy once cold.
- StorageThere are no sealing or processing instructions here, and none should be improvised. Treat the result as a refrigerator preserve, kept cold and eaten within a few weeks, or follow a current tested recipe with measured processing times if you want shelf-stable jars.
- YieldRoughly six to seven pints, as a rough estimate from the quantities given.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to raise money for charity, which is why entries like this one carry an attribution rather than a house style — Mrs. Dickerman is writing down her own working method, not an editor's. Sweet tomato pickles belong to a large family of American sugar-and-vinegar preserves that treated the tomato as a fruit, which botanically it is. The three-to-seven ratio of sugar to fruit, the cloves and cinnamon, and the whole small tomatoes are all characteristic of the type, suited to a glut that arrived every September in any garden that grew them.