Recipe no. 602 from Jean-Baptiste Reboul's La Cuisinière provençale (1909), page 264.
Ingredients
- tomato
- water
- salt
Preparation
- Preparing the tomatoesChoose tomatoes that are not too ripe. Wipe them, cut crosswise and take out the seeds. Arrange in tin cans holding about a litre.
- Covering and solderingCover with lightly salted water. Solder a lid on.
- Brief cookingSet the cans in a stockpot filled with cold water. Place over the heat. As soon as the boiling begins, let it continue for four or five minutes at most.
- CoolingTake the stockpot off the heat and take the cans out only once they are cooled. Wide necked bottles corked with cork and tied may also be used instead.
Reboul's text
Choose tomatoes that are not too ripe; wipe them with a cloth; cut them in two crosswise; take out the seeds, and arrange them in tin cans holding about a litre. Cover them with lightly salted water, and have a lid soldered over them. Then set these cans in a stockpot which you fill with cold water, and place over the heat. When the boiling begins, let it continue for 4 or 5 minutes but no more. Then take the stockpot off the heat, and take the cans out only when they are cooled.
If one had wide necked bottles available, they could be used instead of cans for preparing this preserve; one would then have no need to resort to the tinsmith. In that case they would have to be corked with good quality cork, and the cork tied.
As for the cooking and its length, it must be proportioned to the capacity of the jars: about 4 or 5 minutes for each litre of capacity. Care should be taken to wrap the bottles in hay, so that they do not knock against one another.
Small Provençal glossary for this recipe
Reboul writes in French: no Provençal word appears in this recipe, apart from the dish's name itself. The table below gives the Provençal equivalents of the words used, in mistralian spelling, translated by Lingua Nostra. Each form is attested in our Provençal-English dictionary; click to open the entry.
| Provençal | English |
|---|---|
| toumàti | tomato |
| aigo | water |
| sau | salt |
| fèrri | tin |
| oulo | stockpot |
| siéure | cork |
| fen | hay |
Source: Jean-Baptiste Reboul, La Cuisinière provençale, Marseille, 1909, recipe no. 602, page 264. Public domain. Transcription, formatting and Provençal glossary by Lingua Nostra.