The Honest Courtesan

The tomato season is ending, and cherry tomatoes are much too small to turn into fried green tomatoes.  So I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with all these unripe tomatoes until this past weekend.  See, I’ve still got plenty of apples, and I decided to turn some of them into mincemeat because, unlike many modern Americans, I love mincemeat pies.  But I haven’t made it in over a decade, so I pulled my old recipe card out of its box and was pleased to discover that it actually calls for green tomatoes; the last time I made it I just used red tomatoes because they were available.  But now that I actually have green tomatoes to spare, I’m going to use them.  One irritating factor is that my mincemeat recipe is rather old, and like so many older recipes it lacks proper measurements.  It specifies a certain number of apples without specifying the size (mine range from smaller than a tennis ball to larger than my fist), and though it does specify “large” green tomatoes I remember how big most tomatoes were in the ’70s, when the recipe was published.  So I decided to work backward from the volume of the final product, subtracting all the specified volumes of fluid or solid ingredients (ie ignoring sugar, which dissolves) and then assuming whatever volume was left had to be apples & tomatoes combined.  Of that volume, I figured 60% apples and 40% tomatoes, then halved the recipe so it’ll only make two quarts instead of four; that’ll be enough for two pies, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and also enough to tell whether my guesses were good ones (I have a pretty good track record of reverse-engineeing recipes).  And if I was off on some ingredient or proportion, I can tweak it next autumn because this time I’m going to write down whatever I try, and move it to a permanent card once I get it locked down.