Preserving Tomatoes Months ago I suggested that then, would be
an acute shortage of tomatoes this summer, this shortage, and the fact that it will in- crease again after September, led me to ask for a sound recipe for preserving tomatoes. Some excellent ones have arrived ; there is also a Ministry of Food leaflet, Preserves front the Garden (H.M. Stationery Office, 4d.), in which straightforward methods of preserving tomatoes and salting beans are given. A correspondent declares that she has bottled tomatoes for 25 years by this same method without a single case of botulism. This sounds good. It only uses exactly the same method as for ordinary fruit, i.e, in a Kilner or vacuum jar or in jam-jarr with the patent clipped lids, using the smaller fruit. There is another recipe by which the tomatoes are plunged into boiling water, skinned, and then packed into preserving jars with- out water ; the bottles are then sterilised, filled up with more tomatoes, which tend to shrink in the sterilising process, then put back into the oven for- half an hour. A rather more elaborate recipe sounds interesting. In it the tomatoes are also skinned and packed in jars which are covered with a brine made of i quart of water and oz. salt, to which oz. sugar may be added if required ; sterilise as for ordinary fruit, but raise the temperature to isso° in an hour and a half and maintain it for half an hour. Of beans, in spite of some good recipes, I am still rather sceptical ; possibly someone may improve on the rather tiresome salt-bean sandwich.
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