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Spiced Tomatoes
Mrs. Stotesbury.
To four pounds of large red tomatoes, take two pounds of good brown sugar, one pint of cider vinegar, half ounce of cloves, and half ounce of stick cinnamon; stew all together in a preserving kettle until the tomatoes are cooked; take the tomatoes out and put them on dishes to cool, letting the syrup go on simmering slowly; when the tomatoes are cold return them to the syrup for a little while; let them become cold before putting them in the jars. The syrup must be boiled down as thick as molasses, and poured cold over the tomatoes; tie them down with bladder or waxed paper.
This is a sweet-pickle preserve of the sort that filled nineteenth-century storerooms, but its keeping method is the part that has not survived. The following notes explain the old vocabulary and, more importantly, why the finished jars should not be put up this way.
- The cold pack is the problemEverything here goes into the jar cold: cooled tomatoes, cooled syrup, no heat process at any point after filling. Nothing sterilises the jar or its contents, and nothing drives out air. Modern preserving practice requires a measured boiling-water process for exactly this reason.
- Bladder and waxed paper are not a sealA pig's bladder tied over a crock, or a waxed paper round, keeps out dust and slows evaporation. Neither is airtight, and covers of this kind generally needed checking and re-covering over the storage season. A cover that admits air admits mould spores and yeasts.
- Tomatoes sit on the acidity lineTomatoes are not reliably acidic enough to be safe in a sealed low-oxygen container without added acid measured to a target pH. The pint of cider vinegar here helps, but it is one pint against four pounds of fruit and two pounds of sugar, with no way to know where the finished product lands. Contemporary vinegars also varied in strength.
- Sugar alone is not doing enoughTwo pounds of sugar to four pounds of tomatoes gives a sweet preserve, not a syrup dense enough to be self-preserving the way a stiff jam or candied fruit is. Much of that sugar ends up in the boiled-down syrup rather than saturating the fruit.
- If you want spiced tomatoesUse a current tested recipe from a reputable preserving authority, with its own quantities, acidification and processing time. Do not adapt the method above.
- Reading the old measuresHalf an ounce of cloves is roughly two tablespoons of whole buds; half an ounce of stick cinnamon is several sticks, depending on their length and thickness. Brown sugar in this period meant a soft, partly refined sugar closer to today's light muscovado than to white sugar dyed with molasses.
- The preserving kettleA wide, shallow pan, valued because its shape sped evaporation; such kettles were often brass or copper, though lined and enamelled versions were available by this date. A broad stainless or enamelled pan is the modern equivalent; unlined copper or brass reacts with the vinegar and should not be used.
- Why the tomatoes come outLifting the fruit and reducing the syrup separately is sound technique and worth knowing. It concentrates the syrup without boiling the tomatoes to pulp, and the repeated cooling lets sugar migrate into the fruit rather than shrivelling it.
Spiced or sweet-pickled fruit — peaches, pears, crab apples, damsons and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, tomatoes — was a standard American answer to a glut, and jars of it were set out beside cold meat much as chutney is now. Tomatoes reached the ordinary North American kitchen slowly, and cookbooks of the 1870s still treat them as a fruit to be sugared and spiced as readily as one to be stewed savoury. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by named local women and sold for charity, is one of the earliest community cookbooks of its kind on the continent; the attribution to Mrs. Stotesbury is the whole point of the format, though the book's authority is often said to have rested on the reputations of the housekeepers who signed each receipt — much of its content was in fact lifted from earlier American compilations, attributions included. The instruction to tie the jars down with bladder is a reminder of how recent reliable glass canning jars still were in a working kitchen of that decade.