Nan's Wonderful Tomato Sauce Recipe

[rachel]

I just thought I'd post a tomato sauce recipe which has been in my family for a while. It comes from my cousin's other grandmother. She and her husband own a tomato farm. And everyone calls her 'Nan', although it's not actually her name, and even if they're not her grandchildren.

Also, I just remember that Americans call this stuff 'ketchup', don't they? It tastes pretty much like the stuff you buy at the shops, but somehow nicer, and it took me a while to get used to having the pips in but now I find it awkward to have tomato sauce without the pips in!

Ingredients:
16 pounds or 7.25kg of tomatoes
4 pounds or 1.8kg of sugar
1 1/2 pints or 42.5l of vinegar
4 tablespoons of salt
2 tablespoons of ground cloves
1oz or 57g of grated garlic
2 grated apples
You'll also need a really big saucepan!

Method:
1) Chop the tomatoes roughly. You can skin them if you want but you don't have to, as the skin disintegrates as you cook it.
2)Cook the tomatoes with garlic, vinegar, salt, and cloves, until it's all boiled down. Don't let it catch on the bottom of the saucepan.
3) Add the sugar.
4) Cook for 3 1/2 hours on low heat. Stir it regularly, and make sure it doesn't burn.
5) Wash the bottles and steralise them in the oven. Seal as soon as possible.

That's it. It's actually pretty simple, and it tastes wonderful!

From Rachel.

[Elizabeth]

This really sounds good.. Gonna have to copy it down and try it out.. Our family eats alot of tomato sauce..
Thank you for posting this..
~Elizabeth

[rachel]

So does mine! In summer, we do barbeque a lot, and of course we have tomato sauce with that! My mother has just finished turning 20kg of tomatoes into sauce - some friends in the homeschooling group had thousands of 10kg boxes of tomatoes she wanted to get rid of. We're waiting for our own tomatoes to ripen to make more - we made so much sauce last spring that we thought it would last forever, but before summer was over, we were back to buying sauce from the shops. We're hoping this year we won't have to!

[Pam]

Do you happen to know what those measurements are in english or for in the USA?

[rachel]

Well, Nan gave us the recipe in pounds and ounces and pints, et cetera, but Australia went over to metric measurement about 40 years ago, so I used the imperial-metric converter my mother got in high school to put it all into metric, because that's what I think in.

So, the first measurement (16 pounds of tomatoes) is the imperial measurement, and the second (7.25kg of tomatoes) is the metric. I thought America used imperial measurement (pounds, ounces, yards, miles, inches). Is this not so? Or maybe I'm just very, very confused.

This is the only recipe I've put up with both imperial and metric. I've put up at least one other, entirely in metric, I think. For those who don't know metric;

1 cubic centimetre of pure water at 3 degrees Celsius equals 1 gram (g), and it also 1 mililitre (ml).

1000 grams = 1 kilogram (aka 'kilo') (kg).
1000 ml = 1 litre (l).

Also, 250ml is 1 cup.

Please forgive me if I've written it in the wrong measurement for you! As I said, I think in metric. I can also do cups, but pounds and ounces completely befuddle me. I also wasn't aware that English pounds and ounces were different to American ones...