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Sweet Green Pickles
The green tomatoes or other fruits should be sliced, and six large sliced onions added-if they are liked-for each peck of material. Sprinkle between the layers a teacupful of salt, and let them stand over night. Drain and boil in two quarts of water and one of vinegar; drain again. The fruit must then be boiled fifteen minutes in the following pickle: Two pounds brown sugar, four quarts strong vinegar, half a pound of green mustard, two tablespoonfuls each of cloves, ginger and cinnamon, to which have been added six sliced mango peppers.
X. Catsups.
ALL pickles, catsups, condiments or preserved fruits, must be kept in a cold (not freezing), dark place. Catsup is a semi-liquid condiment, and is made of tomatoes, green walnuts, mushrooms, or similar substances that will impart a pleasant flavor.
A late-season green tomato pickle written for a household putting up bushels at a time. Scale it down before anything else: a peck of tomatoes is roughly 10 to 12 pounds, and the pickle syrup here is sized to match.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure of eight quarts, which works out to about 10-12 lb of sliced green tomatoes. Quartering the whole recipe gives a manageable batch of around 3 lb of fruit.
- Teacupful of saltA teacupful is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, though period usage varied and some books equate it with a gill or a half-pint. It is a dry salting meant to draw water out overnight, and much of it is drained away, so the finished pickle is less salty than the figure suggests.
- Mango peppers"Mangoes" in nineteenth-century American cookery are sweet peppers, so called because they were stuffed and pickled in imitation of pickled Indian mangoes. Six sliced bell peppers, green or red, is what is meant. No tropical fruit is involved.
- Green mustardHalf a pound of "green mustard" is genuinely ambiguous. It most probably means mustard seed sold loose by weight, though the phrase could also cover a prepared mustard. If you use whole seed, half a pound is roughly a cup and a quarter, which is a lot but not out of line for a peck of fruit.
- Strong vinegar"Strong" vinegar means a good sharp full-strength vinegar, not a reduced or doubled one. Use a modern cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, and do not substitute a mild wine vinegar or anything labelled below 5 percent; the acid is what preserves the jars.
- The blanching stepBoiling the drained slices in two quarts water to one of vinegar, then draining again, softens the fruit and draws off some of its liquid before the sweet pickle goes on.
- Fifteen minutes, no moreFifteen minutes is what the recipe specifies; green tomatoes hold their shape well but will soften with longer boiling. Time it from the moment the pickle returns to a full boil.
- Storing itThe book's advice to keep pickles in a cold, dark place assumes a cellar and a household that ate through the crock. There are no sterilising or sealing instructions here; follow a current water-bath canning procedure for the jars, or treat the batch as a refrigerator pickle and use it within a couple of months.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and a full peck makes a very large batch. The ground spices will darken the syrup within a few weeks, which is normal.
Sweet green tomato pickle is a frost-driven recipe. Tomatoes set fruit until the first cold night and then stop ripening, and a household with a garden was left with pounds of hard green ones that could not be canned as tomatoes but pickled beautifully in a spiced brown-sugar syrup. The "mango peppers" in the ingredient list preserve an older bit of English kitchen vocabulary: pickled stuffed mangoes were an admired import, and by the eighteenth century "to mango" meant to pickle a hollowed vegetable in that style, so sweet peppers themselves came to be called mangoes in American markets well into the twentieth century. The passage on catsup tacked to the end shows how such compilations were built, with pickle, condiment and preserving instructions run together in a single chapter and a general note on cold, dark storage doing the work that a modern book would give to a page on sealing jars.