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Tomatoes Whole for Winter Use
Mrs. J. Saulter.
Fill a large stone jar with ripe tomatoes, then add a few whole cloves and a little sugar; cover them well with one half cold vinegar and half water; place a piece of flannel over the jar well down into the vinegar, then tie down with paper. I have kept tomatoes in this way the year round, and can cheerfully recommend them.
Should mildew collect on the flannel it will not injure the tomatoes in the least.
This is an open-crock pickle held at room temperature for months, and the contributor's own note about mildew is the clearest sign of why it cannot be recommended. The problems are with the method itself, not with any single step.
- The brine is too weak to preserveVinegar cut half-and-half with water lands somewhere near 2 to 2.5 percent acetic acid, and nineteenth-century household vinegar was of unknown and variable strength to begin with. Safe pickling depends on holding the finished product at pH 4.6 or below, which diluted vinegar cannot be relied on to do.
- Tomatoes sit right on the lineTomatoes hover around pH 4.3 to 4.9 depending on variety and ripeness, and some varieties fall on the wrong side of 4.6. Whole fruit steeped in weak vinegar will not necessarily acidify all the way to the centre, leaving an interior that is neither acid nor cooked.
- Mildew is not harmlessThe recipe treats surface mould as a cosmetic nuisance. Moulds and film yeasts feed on acetic acid and raise the pH of the liquid beneath them, which is precisely the condition that permits Clostridium botulinum to grow in the oxygen-poor depths of a crock of low-acid vegetables.
- No heat, no seal, no measureThere is no processing step, no boiling of the brine, no salt, no weight of tomatoes and no proportion of sugar given. A cloth and a tied paper cover exclude dust and nothing else. Nothing here can be scaled or checked.
- Room temperature for a yearThe recipe gives no storage instruction at all; 'the year round' in an unheated pantry or cellar meant something different from a modern kitchen at 68 to 72F. Warm storage accelerates every spoilage organism the weak brine fails to suppress.
- What to do insteadWhole tomatoes can be safely canned at home, but only with added bottled lemon juice or citric acid in measured amounts and a tested process time. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority rather than adapting this one.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the great wave of community charity cookbooks of the 1870s, assembled from recipes solicited from local housekeepers and printed with each contributor's name attached, as Mrs. J. Saulter's is here. That format is why so many of these entries read like a neighbour talking rather than a set of instructions: the authority behind the recipe is personal reputation, not testing, and "I have kept tomatoes in this way the year round" was considered sufficient proof. Crock pickling in a stone jar under a cloth was the ordinary way to hold vegetables before home canning in glass with reliable seals became widespread. The tomato itself was still a comparative newcomer to English-Canadian and American kitchens in this period, having gone from ornamental curiosity to garden staple over the middle decades of the century, and preserving a glut of them whole was a genuine problem to which everyone had a slightly different answer.