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Tomato Butter
Mrs. Johnson.
Nine pounds peeled tomatoes, three pounds sugar, one pint vinegar, three tablespoons cinnamon, one tablespoon cloves, one and one-half tablespoons allspice; boil three or four hours until quite thick, and stir often, that it may not burn,
A spiced tomato preserve of the sweet-and-sour type that was standard in nineteenth-century pantries. The method is sound; what needs translating is the spice load, the vinegar, and how you keep the finished butter.
- The hinge: low heat and constant attentionThree to four hours of reducing 9 lb of tomatoes with 3 lb of sugar is a long window for scorching, and once the bottom catches the whole batch tastes burnt. Use a wide, heavy, non-reactive pan (stainless or enamelled cast iron, never bare aluminium or copper with this much vinegar) and stir down into the corners, not just around the surface.
- Peeling the tomatoesThe original assumes you know to blanch them. Score, drop into boiling water 30-60 seconds, then into cold; the skins slip off. Nine pounds of tomatoes peeled is roughly 10 lb bought.
- Sugar and vinegar in cupsThree pounds of granulated sugar is about 6 3/4 cups. A pint is 2 cups; in a Canadian or American book of this date the imperial pint of 20 fl oz is possible, so treat 2 to 2 1/2 cups as the range. Use ordinary 5% cider or white vinegar.
- The spices are not a misprint, but they are strongThree tablespoons of cinnamon, one of cloves and one and a half of allspice, all presumably ground, give a very heavily spiced preserve by current taste. Halving them gives a result many modern cooks will prefer, and using whole spices tied in muslin avoids the gritty texture ground cloves leave behind.
- Judging "quite thick"The butter is done when a spoonful dropped on a chilled plate holds its shape and weeps no watery ring at the edge, and when a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly. Depending on how juicy the tomatoes are this can come well before four hours.
- YieldHard to predict, but with 3 lb of sugar in the pan expect somewhere in the region of 7 to 8 cups of finished butter, about four pint jars.
- StorageThe recipe stops at the pan and says nothing about putting it up. Refrigerate it and use within a few weeks, or freeze it. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested tomato-butter canning procedure rather than improvising from this text.
Fruit butters — apple, peach, pear, quince — were the standard way of turning a glut into something that kept, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the tomato had joined the list in North American kitchens, treated frankly as the fruit it botanically is. The sugar-and-vinegar-and-sweet-spice formula here is the same one behind tomato catsup and the chow-chows and "sweet pickles" of the era, and it reflects a period when preserving was done by boiling down with sugar and acid rather than by measured processing. The Home Cook Book belongs to the compiled-and-contributed tradition: recipes gathered from named local women, each credited, and sold in aid of a charity, which is why this one arrives simply as Mrs. Johnson's and assumes the reader already knows how to peel a tomato and fill a jar.