We do something similar, but refer to it as 'tomato jam'. The basic recipe I got from the 85 yr old woman down the road. It is pretty simple, depending on how much time you wish to spend on the tomatoes.

Take the biggest oven dish you have, and fill it mostly full of peeled, seeded tomatoes. Add a 2 lb bag of brown sugar. Crush up 2 cinnamon sticks. Bake in the oven at 300 for several hours, stirring occasionally, until thick.

Can, we use hot pack pints and a BWB for 15 min.

This is very pretty if you use yellow tomatoes, it comes out a rich golden color. Some batches, we add slivers of hot peppers.

Thanks for the recipe david,
when you say the biggest oven dish, are you referring to a typical 9x13 casserole? or bigger? What do you use? That's a lot of brown sugar, so I'll bet it's pretty sweet! when you say cinnamon sticks crushed, is this something that will be eaten up in the jelly?

Cinnamon sticks are quite hard. I abraded the inside of a plastic domed coffee grinder that I wanted to use to grind up cinnamon sticks. Yes, they turned to a powder, but it took several minutes and now I can't even see into the grinding cup area anymore.

before I respond to your question about your Mom's Tomato preserves, I must tell you I am 72 years old and for the past few years I have been digging up and testing recipes that my mother and grandmothers prepared for us when I was young. Most of those recipes were lost. I have found several cookbooks from their era and have "harvested" many and have come up with "acceptable" substitute ingredients and procedures.
The hardest thing I have tried to do has been retaining the taste of those old canning recipes while conforming to today's safety standards. The saddest day of this quest was the day I tasted MY Iced Green Tomato Pickles made from a very old recipe. They tasted nothing like the ones I remembered my mother canning each year.
Your quest is particularly hard because between today and when your mother was growing up, we have learned that tomatoes are not (maybe, never were) as acid as we thought they were. To be safe, we use ingredients and techniques that our grandmothers did not use and, therefore, we change the taste (or, maybe it's just our memory that has changed.)
Do you think it is the taste of the cinnamon or the very presence of the cinnamon stick?
And the next question is are you planning to try to replicate the taste she remembers by coming up with a recipe which you will can yourself?
If you want to persue the later course, I will be very happy to search some of my old cookbooks and see if we can come up with a 21st-century-safe recipe.
By the way, am I older or younger than your mother?

I looked through my old books but the tomato preserves only used lemon, not cinnamon. The tomato jam recipes used cinnamon but were the wrong consistency. (Bits of tomato suspended).

Then I tried a web search and found this one on the Uncle Phaedrus site. Does this sound close?

TOMATO PRESERVES

Ingredients :
2 lb. tomatoes
4 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. water
1 lemon (sliced thin)
1 stick cinnamon
2 pieces ginger root

Preparation :
Use small, firm tomatoes. Scald tomatoes 1 minute. Dip into cold water. Skin, but do not core. Combine sugar, water, lemon, cinnamon and ginger. Simmer for 20 minutes. Remove cinnamon stick and ginger. Add tomatoes and simmer until they are bright and transparent. Cover and let stand overnight. Pack cold tomatoes into hot (scalded) canning jars. Boil syrup until thick as honey,
then pour hot syrup over tomatoes. Process in boiling water bath 15 minutes to seal.

The method will leave you with chunks of tomato suspended in a jell as long as they are firm-ripe. I would change a couple of things.

1) The second day strain out the tomatoes and cook the syrup down; syrup should be about 220 for the jell point. Then add the tomato pieces in and bring back up to 220° - just a few minutes should do it.

2) Pour into prepped jars. Add a bit of cinnamon stick to each jar, if desired. Boiling Water Bath 10 minutes. (15 for pints).

I hope this is close to what you're looking for.

Carol

Cateyanne, I use a huge, industrial size lasagna pan. Its stainless steel, 4" deep, 14" x 18" or so. It sure holds a lot of tomatoes (and lasagna) and is relatively flat and shallow so the evaporation is quicker. My neighbor uses the bottom of a broiler pan. With my huge thing, It can take the better part of a day to cook down, which is probably a waste of energy; something smaller would work a lot quicker.

I use ground cinnamon, not the crushed sticks, just personal preference and because we always try to have a selection of cinnamon varieties from Penzey's around. My neighbor just took the cinnamon sticks, put them in a bag, and whacked them with a hammer. With the powdered cinnamon, its better to add it in about 1/2 an hour before its done, otherwise it looses most of the flavor.

I would think that if one were worried about the acidity of the recipe, then adding some lemon juice or lime juice would probably do the trick.

Its very good stuff, and a favorite for gifts.

After many many tries at making green tomato pickilili, my mom combined the best of two recipes. One was for all the spices needed, the other was for the salt treatment they get prior to cooking and canning processes. After all those attempts, she still used the two recipes, along with her own notes. My dad would help get the green toms, as well as peel and slice many pounds of onions. Interestingly, she never bothered making regular pickles of any kind. Years after her passing, I found a couple of jars still sealed, but when they were opened, the contents was a bit grayish and mushy. Not very appetizing, but heck, it was about 20 years old..

Carol ... that must be the recipe...
that's a great site.
I just got engrossed in reading all those old advertising cookbooks. Especially the Watkins Spice booklet from 1917
The canning instructions are rather skimpy .. however, it does seem as if they cooked everything to death before and after canning.
Those germs just gave up!!!!

Great! I'm glad to help. I can't speak for other canning recipes on that site, but in this case I don't see a risk in using the recipe without modification per the processing time or ingredients.

The firm-ripe tomatoes should be sufficient acidity, but in addition there's the lemon and loads of sugar. Safety isn't an issue.

Carol

Thanks Carol. i will see if that sounds like what my mom is talking about. i unfortunately never got to taste this stuff so have no idea myself what it should look like or taste like. She did say it had a spicy taste so the combination of cinnamon, ginger and lemon might produce what she is calling spicy. And although she called it tomato preserve, which makes me think of something thicker, she says it was thin and would slip off the knife when you tried to put it on something. Again, this could have just been my grandmother's inability to get it to jell as much as it should have!

kayskats, Yes i am trying to come up with what my mom remembers, I do unfortunately know I probably will never get it exactly right but I'd like to try and get as close as possible. I would appreciate it if you look through your old books, something might just come up! I think she remembers the stick and the flavor because she said it was spicy, but I don't have any idea how much of that spicy taste came from tne cinnamon sticks and how much from some other flavor? Oh, my mom just turned 71 this past February!

ksrogers, My grandmother probably did a lot of improvising too, and some things were never written down because she knew how to make it and I guess wasn't thinking about the future! My gr grandmother canned the best green tomato mincemeat and after she died which was 1968, my brother and I tried every year or so to put up mincemeat from her recipe. Back in 1992 at Christmas my brother who now lives in her house found a couple of jars that she had canned that last year before she died. They had been hidden behind some other things in her cellar(which he had been in many times!)Well, the jars looked good and even though they had been canned 24 years earlier we opened them to inspect the contents. Believe it or not we actually decided to make a pie for Christmas! We probably shouldn't have tried it, but I'm so glad we were that brave or stupid!! It was pure heaven!! We figured she just couldn't stand the way we were butchering her recipe so she provided us with this special Christmas gift! We made those couple of jars last a few more years, they are all gone now, but what a treat! And we have changed a couple of things we did with her recipe since then. Ours is really good but nothing can bring back those old flavors!

haven't found anything that sounds closer than the recipe Carol dug up.
Where I grew up in Atlanta, preserves were whole fruits in a rather runny, certainly not jellied, syrup. The fruit becomes transluscent. My Dad did whole fig perserves in much the same manner as the recipe Carol found.

could be a tomato jelly then and my mom is just calling it the wrong thing?

Oh, certainly cateyanne. I recently found a recipe and didn't know if it was a pickle or a preserve. The recipe writers didn't either and called it pickled preserves.
On that line, I make a chili sauce. It's basically a chunky catsup. It has cloves, cinnamon, allspice, ginger (ground, not whole), vinegar and a whole lot of sugar. I say it is spicy. I add jalapenos to the recipe and that makes it spicy hot. But my son-in-law thinks spicy means lots of peppers.
But back to my chili, I stopped at a local farmers market a couple of years ago and there were some jars of my chili sauce, and the lady who canned it called it Tomato Preserves. Except for the sweetness, it's nothing like what I call a preserve.
There are upteen jillion versions of chili sauce, but here's mine:

CHILI Sauce
Makes about 7 pints

20 large ripe tomatoes (1 peck) peeled, cored, seeded, and chopped
6 medium yellow onions about 2 cups chopped
7 hot green peppers chopped
3 tbsps salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
5 cups sugar
4 cups cider vinegar

combine all ingredients and cook slowly until thick (several hours) stirring frequently to prevent sticking. Seal in hot jars (and process 15 minutes in hot water bath.)

(You could put some cinamon chunks in it, but I don't think this is it.)

Here's the strongest competetor I've found:

TOMATO CONSERVE
Source: Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, Margaret Rudkin
Yield: 6 - 7 half pints
"In 1926 we bought 125 acres of land in Connecticut, part of which had once been a farm." -MR (they called it Pepperidge Farm)

4 lbs ripe red but firm tomatoes
2 small navel oranges
1 lemon
1 5" stick of cinnamon
12 whole cloves
Sugar (equal to weight of tomatoes when ready to cook)
1/3 cup sliced candied ginger
Parafin -- which we'll forget about

Wash, blanch, skin and slice fine the tomatoes, and set aside
Quarter and slice fine the oranges and lemon, discarding seeds
Drain off any juice that may have formed on the tomatoes and weigh them.
Place in a large kettle and add an equal weight of granulated sugar.
Put on the stove and stir until the sugar is dissolved.
Add the oranges, lemon, cinnamon (broken into several pieces) and cloves
Bring quickly to a boil over high heat and skim carefully
Reduce the heat slightly and cook until it sheets from the side of a silver spoon, or for about 1 1/4 hours; watch carefully, stirring frequently, as it scorches very easily.
Ten minutes before you think it will be done, add the sliced candied ginger.
Place in (hot) jars .....
(Adjust two part lids and Process in BWB xxxx minutes.)

This is definitely the right era for your mother to have had it when she was young. The cinnamon is broken into pieces and the cinnamon and candied ginger add the spiceness.

I'm pretty sure that using firm tomatoes, oranges and lemon make this recipe safe ... but I do NOT know how long it should be processed. What do you think Carol?

I also am a bit unsure just how to judge "10 minutes before you think it will be done"

I think this could also be called a Tomato Marmalade. I'd say it's safe. Tomatoes, citrus and sugar in those amounts wouldn't leave much latitude for risk. I'd can it as I would any preserve, 10 minutes for half-pints, 15 minutes for pints.

I like spice and love ginger, but looking at 6 little 8-oz. jars, I'm not sure I'd want that much ginger and cloves in proportion to 1 stick of cinnamon. I might cut it a little, at least the first time around and see how the flavor developed/changed over time in the jars. Actually, I like the idea of just the cinnamon and ginger or just the ginger and citrus. There are just lots of possibilities.

10 minutes before it's done . . . I love these old recipes that take it for granted any home preserver would "just know" what's meant. Actually, I think that cooking time is too long. Ideally with a preserve you cook fast, evaporate the water off as quickly as you can and don't let it cook so long that the sugars caramelize and the preserve turns brown.

220-221° is the set point so maybe add the ginger at 217-218°, somewhere around there, or when the fruit has become translucent and the juice has become a syrup with some body. If you put a dollop on a cold plate, it would sit with some form but would still run a bit when the plate's tilted.

I'm wondering if adding the ginger 10 minutes before is to allow for its dryness. I think moist ginger could be stirred in the last couple of minutes or the mixture could be finished, the ginger stirred in and allowed to sit 5 minutes before going into the jars.

Carol

Carol, I also wondered what makes it a conserve.. maybe the use of several fruits?
if I were to do this recipe I think I'd leave out the cloves -- or just use a couple. I'd also leave the cinnamon stick whole and remove it before canning -- but that's what cateyanne's mother recalls -- the bits of cinnamon stick floating around.
I do suspect that the candied ginger available in the 30's would have been much drier than what we get today. Also, isn't ginger one of those spices that lose strength pretty quickly? That may account for the rather large amount.
Reducing the overall cooking time also makes sense.
thanks for working with me on this
-- hope it's what cateyanne's mom is looking for.

It's really hard to re-create those old recipes for someone who remembers a flavor from youth. For one thing, as we age taste buds die and we become less sensitive to nuances of taste. It's difficult to make something that lives up to memory. Not to mention that many of those dishes are bound up with the past, the people, the smells, the atmosphere of another time.

I grew up with sausage we made from our own pigs, chickens we killed and cleaned on the back porch then fried in our own fresh lard. The cast iron was old and well-seasoned and the nickel-trimmed wood stove baked rolls like nobody's business.

When I was a small child I and my brother would go with my father to the feed mill. A special treat on those hot summer days was a bottle of coke from the machine. It was that old hourglass-shaped bottle, small enough for a child to hold comfortably. The bottle came out of the machine covered with a fine dust from the cattle feed being ground. The whole mill smelled sweet, like grain, and the bottle sweated with the condensation, so that you drank coke, tasted flour and felt the cold wet dew on the outside. I'll never have a coke like that again.

How do I ever recreate those things? All I can do is remember and treasure. We forget food is an experience.

Even if you have the recipe, each cook has his/her own methods and unless you watch and note what is done and then practice, practice, practice, it just doesn't come out the same. I am forever grateful that as spacey a kid as I was, somewhere in the back of my mind I had sense enough to ask all kinds of questions about family recipes I knew no one else made. The same was true of my MIL's recipes and now I've become the family repository for all of them.

I'm a good cook. Some old recipes I've even bettered, but the Scots are right when they say every woman's shortbread is unique. It's the hands, not the ingredients.

OK, to get back to the point. All those definitions are fluid - preserve, conserve, marmalade, jam, etc. Marmalade generally has citrus, but if it's half fruit and half sugar (by weight) it's also a preserve. Then if you look at really old recipes you might see something like an "Apple Marmalade" from 1871 that's just apples and sugar. I guess the cook decides what it's called.

Jams by definition have more sugar than fruit with chunks or pieces in the mixture. So "low-sugar jam" is actually an oxymoron. (Like "giant shrimp"). If a jam has vinegar added, technically it's not a jam but a chutney, so some of the recipes called "Tomato Jam" aren't really.

A conserve doesn't have vinegar; it includes fruit, sugar, dried fruits like raisins, and nuts. The nuts make it a conserve for me. Unless the cook decides differently, LOL.

I don't know if the candied ginger in the 30's would have been drier or not. Too many variables, including regional and ethnic (plus I wasn't alive in the 30's, not even a twinkle). I never even "experienced" candied ginger until I was an adult. Powdered ginger was as close as I got.

It is fun to consider and remember these old preserves. I think of a lot of them as a part of our history. Especially for many women, history was not written in textbooks or descriptions of battles but in recipes.

Carol

wow, Carol ... that is downright lyrical.

Candied ginger is also called crystalized ginger and is enjoyed like a spicy candy.. I usually thinly slice ginger and store it in sweetened rice wine, rice wine vinegar, or even a dry sherry.

did you miss the last post cateyanne... I think this may be it.

Sorry everybody, it wasn't that I wasn't interested. We left for vacation and with all the getting ready to go, then all the putting back together after we got back, i have not had much time to spend at the computer. I really like the sound of that last recipe kayskats! I am definitely going to try that one! My grandmother was not an exceptional cook. Her German mother ruled in the kitchen and most of the time my grandmother was not even allowed in there while her mother cooked, baked, canned, etc. Which she did mostly from memory. It never made sense to me that if she was so dedicated to the kitchen, why she would not want her only daughter in there with her, preserving the family recipes. Anyway, my grandmother did not learn to cook at her mother's knee. She instead learned late and relied a lot on popular cookbooks, pamphlets, fliers, newspaper articles and what ever else she could get her hands on to learn new recipes. I know this because I still have a lot of them. and her recipe book is littered with cut outs from the backs of boxes and labels from cans. So the idea that this recipe came from a Pepperidge Farm cookbook makes it more likely that it would be something she used. I know I can not recreate the exact taste from my mother's memory. but we're having fun trying and I appreciate so much everyone's help and interest. Can't wait for the tomato harvest! I will keep you posted on our results!

hey, cateyanne ... glad you signed back on.
I thought of you and your mother when I was making onion relish the other day. I goofed and dumped the pickling spice into the pot rather than tied in cheesecloth. I'll be picking bits of cinnamon, clove, all spice, etc out of my teeth every time I eat it, but looking at the jars on the shelf, I really understood what your mother was talking about.

Cateyanne, I bet I know exactly the recipe your mom's talking about! In fact it's really funny because I just made two batches of it this morning, and now I find this site and here's your question. I hadn't had any in sooo long and it was just yummy. I've seen the other posts on this thread and every one of them sounds good, but my recipe is just a simple one.

Tomato Preserves
I used to make this every summer. The flavor is different than one would expect, is delicious on toast. Lovely in the jar. Makes good gifts.

6 cups peeled, cut up tomatoes
1 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon rind (optional)
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
6 cups sugar
Pat of margarine

Measure 6 cups peeled, cut up tomatoes into a large kettle. Add lemon rind, allspice, cinnamon and cloves. Add sugar and margarine to tomatoes. Stir and bring to a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down. Then boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Pour hot jam into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Wipe rims of jars with a dampened clean paper towel; adjust two-piece metal canning lids, process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

My original recipe didn't call for the boiling water bath, but I'm putting it in for safety's sake. When I make jam I have never done the boiling water bath and have never had a problem, didn't find out there were new rules till lurking here. I just have always made sure my jars are super clean, I keep them boiling-water hot till just before I fill them, I simmer my flats in boiling water. And the jam is 220 degrees.

When I use this recipe, I use a jam thermometer. 220 degrees is the jelly point. This jam is supposed to be a little runny. If you have any doubts about the consistency, put a little on a saucer and slip the saucer in the freezer to cool off fast. Take it out when cool and look at it. If it's the consistency you want, then your preserves are done. It's also up to you how big the tomato chunks are to be. Some people don't like the seeds so they run the tomatoes through a food processor and strain out the seeds. Myself, I like chunks and I think the seeds makes the preserves look pretty. If and when I use lemon peel, I use a zest cutter to make little strips, and I'll zest the whole lemon and put them all in. They look pretty in the jar. If you're worried about acidity you could add a little lemon juice.

BTW, I'm 60 and of German/English descent. --Ilene

Here is a recipe I found in my grandmother's recipe file after she passed away (1911-1987). I don't remember her making it, but my Mom does. The powdered pectin might make it firmer than your Mom remembers, though. For safety's sake, you will want to adjust the time in the BWB to meet today's standards.

SPICED TOMATO JAM WITH POWDERED PECTIN

3 cups prepared tomatoes*
1½ teaspoon grated lemon rind
½ teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
4½ cups sugar
1 box powdered pectin
¼ cup bottled lemon juice

To prepare tomatoes: Wash firm-ripe tomatoes. Scald, peel and chop. Place in saucepan. Then cover and simmer 10 minutes, stirring constantly. Measure 3 cups tomatoes into jam cooking pot.

Add lemon rind, allspice, cinnamon and cloves to prepared tomatoes. Stir lemon juice and powdered pectin into prepared fruit. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring constantly. Stir in sugar all at once. While stirring, bring to a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down. Boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly, then remove from heat. Skim off foam.

Pour hot jam immediately into hot, sterile canning jars, leaving ¼-inch headspace. Wipe jar rims and adjust lids. Process for 5 minutes in boiling water bath.

Yield: About 5 half-pint jars

5 minutes in sterile jars does meet today's standards. 10 minutes in hot clean jars (but not sterile).

Carol

Cateyanne,
I loved reding your post about finding the jars of your Grandmothers mincemeat. I firmly believe it has nothing to do witht he recipe, it was the fact that her hands made it. I have made my Mom's spaghetti sauce for years exactly the way she made it and I insist it doesn't taste quite like hers. My sister, who cant cook to save her life says mine tastes just like Mom's but I think she is just happy that I make her sauce, otherwise she would never get homemade! :)

Dont be too disappointed that you cant acquire quite the same taste as Grams, make it your own and your descendants will be saying the same thing when they find YOUR mincemeat tucked away in the basement.

Happy Harvesting,
Susan in NC

I have a question on this topic;

I want to make tomato preserves, jam, or something. I am noticing most of the recipes call for cinnamon, ginger, cloves, for those of you who have made this, do the spices overwhelm the tomato flavor? I would sort of like the tomatos to poke through the other flavors?

I just made cantalope preserves for the first time with lopes from our garden and I think the recipe called for too much sugar, not much cantalope flavor, but it came out real pretty and set up great.
Maybe over time it will taste more lope-y.

Thanks for helping with the tomato question.
Susan in NC

This evening when I took some sweet 100 variety tomatoes to my brother and sister in law he suggested that "someone" should use them to make tomato preserves like Mama used to. I don't remember any tomato preserves, but he is quite a bit older than I am so Mama may have made them before I came along. He said she made them with whole tommy toe tomatoes, and as well as I can remember, those little tomatoes were no where as sweet as the ones I have in my garden now.

Mama would be 92 if she was still alive, and I don't recall seeing a recipe for tomato preserves....not that she used a recipe very often. A couple of her sisters are still living and I plan to contact them tomorrow to see if they remember how she made them. Maybe with their input I can figure out something.

I love that everybody is getting into this thread. It just goes to show gardeners are not only just making food for their tables, their keepers of history, and they sure do like a good mystery! I'm much more confident now that I will find something very close to that recipe of my grandmothers. My mother, who has not stepped into the computer age and has rebuffed any attempts I've made to interest her in this little machine, is getting such a kick out of all the posts and the sincere interest that she has started asking me if "I've gotten on that thing today to see what your friends are talking about?" I'll get her to want a computer yet! She is now reminiscing about other recipes lost to the years! One at a time mom, one at a time!

Well, I'll throw in a recipe that was in my Grandmother's recipes. She would have been making it during the mid-1930s. Keep in mind this is verbatim from the old cookbook...

SPICED TOMATOES
Take red and yellow pear shaped tomatoes; prick with a fork, sprinkle with salt, let stand over night, pack in glass jar and cover with Western Vitalized Spirit Vinegar (sponsor of the cookbook), prepare as follows for 1/2 gallon jar; 1 pint WVS Vinegar; 1 tsp cloves, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp allspice, 1 tsp pepper, 1 tbsp sugar. The spices should be ground. Let this come to a boil and pour it over the tomatoes; after they get cold, tie strong paper over them.

This comes from a canning book, but it doesn't sound like it was canned. Probably more liquid than what you are looking for, but I thought the spices were interesting. "Strong paper over the top"......lol...it's a wonder they ever survived and I'm here today ;-)

I doubt there's much risk since the tomatoes are pickled in 100% vinegar. What makes it problematic today is "Vitalized Spirit Vinegar" might have been 7%, 10%, who knows? in strength compared to today's commonly available 5% vinegar.

A lot of those old recipes were fairly safe, even unprocessed, because the vinegar was stronger.

Carol

That brings up a question I have had for some time. I have often wondered if the acidity of vinegar has changed over the years. Less acidity must affect taste of things as well. I have taken over making my mothers deviled eggs for the past twenty years. Yet I have a difficult time getting the right "bite" in the stuffing. I have always known that I was following her recipe exactly but over the years I must keep adjusting it to compensate for less bite from the vinegar. I concluded it was the acidity and tried to find vinegar with a higher acid level but all vinegars I see in stores are only 5%. Is there a source for higher acid vinegars? Does anyone know why vinegar is less acid now?

Yummmmm.........All the recipes sound so good!

I think I might try the Tomato Preserve recipe that Carol found. But how much is "2 pieces of ginger root"?

Michelle

I don't have an answer on why vinegar is less strong today. A lot of wine vinegars range up around 7%, but they won't give you the flavor you want for your deviled eggs either. Red wine vinegar just isn't "devilled egg compatible," LOL.

If Ken comes on, he may have so info on a source for a stronger vinegar. Another possibility is look online for powdered acetic acid. That's what gives vinegar its bite and a pinch added to the eggs might get the flavor you're seeking.

On the ginger root, I'd start with two quarter-size slices about 1/8" thick. It's very flexible, but with ginger less is more. It's really easy to overdo it. I discovered that many years ago. Being an inexperienced cook I made a peach chutney which was way, way too heavy in ginger. I ended up throwing it out, it was that awful. Now I'd look at that recipe and recognize there was an error in the printing or just way too gingery for our taste.

Carol

I looked through the Vitalized Vinegar book. It was a Canadian company. The only reference I could see to strength is "pure spirit, malt and cider"....."under government supervision." There is also a little running ad across the top of the pages....one reads "Western Vinegars are Vitalized Vinegars....Vitalized Vinegars mean strength."

In the back they also note that this vinegar is good for removing dried on paint from brushes. Lol. I'm guessing it may have been pretty strong ;-)

I just love looking through these old recipes.

Here is one from a very old Kerr canning book:

Tomato Jam

5 Lbs. ripe tomatoes
5 cups brown sugar
2 1/2 cups vinegar
3 cups seedless raisins
1 tbs. each whole cloves, allspice and stick cinnamon

Cut tomatoes in pieces after peeling. Add sugar and vinegar, and spice tied in cheesecloth. Boil slowly for 2 hours, add raisins chopped, and boil 1 hour longer. Remove spices and pour into sterilzed KERR Jars and seal while hot.

thanks for the info. on acetic acid Carol, that may be the way to go.
I love looking at old recipes too, suzyq2! I've got a few from my grandmother's books that are pretty funny. Maybe I'll post them in a different topic though.

My mother's in her 80s now, but when she was first married in 1946, she used the Joy of Cooking, War Edition, cookbook. I inherited it, although it's kind of in pieces now, but I found this recipe. If this isn't it, it certainly sounds similar.

Tomato Preserves

Scald and skin:

1 pound tomatoes

If red tomatoes are used, slice them. Cover the tomatoes with:

An equal amount of sugar

Permit them to stand for 12 hours. Put the juice through a strainer. Boil it until the sirup (sic) falls from a spoon in heavy drops. Add the tomatoes and:

Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon or 2 lemons, thinly sliced (seeds removed)

2 ounces ginger root or preserved ginger**

Cook the preserves until they are thick.

**Four inches of stick cinnamon may be substituted.

So much is lost when older folk pass on. My grandmother was a wonderful gardener and a great baker as well. Everything of hers was sold at garage sales: all of her quilts and crocheted items, her Singer treadle sewing machine, her silverware...so many things that would probably have been classed as antique was just considered to be junk because it was old. And none of her gardening or cooking lore was passed down. My mother wasn't interested, and no one asked me.

I wish I could get a copy of the War Edition Joy of Cooking that wasn't falling apart.

Those old cookbooks can be really precious, not just the recipes but the memories and the people.

The War Edition was published in 1943 and then reprinted through 1946. After the war the same edition continued in publication until 1951. The recipes remained but the rationing information was deleted.

I did a search. Here are some copies on AbeBooks. Price basically reflects condition, so it depends on how much you want to pay. Or you can just bookmark the site and check yourself from time to time. If you do an advanced search you can indicate years of publication you're interested in. Otherwise you're searching through 600+ copies of "Joy of Cooking."

Carol

My great grandmother (born circa 1895) made tomato preserves, She had a Dutch, French and English background. I remember they were very dark and had whole cloves. A Thanksgiving table was not complete without them. My mother hated them and can't help with piecing together a recipe. I hope with all of your input in this thread, that I might come up with something close or at least worthy of my own Thanksgiving table.