Home › Sauces, Salads, Pickles and Condiments › Tomato Chow-Chow
Tomato Chow-Chow
Slice one peck of green tomatoes, six green peppers, one onion, strewing a cup of fine salt over them. After standing one night, turn off the water. Put them in a preserving kettle, with vinegar enough to cover them, add one cup of sugar, one cup of grated horseradish, one tablespoon of whole cloves, one of ground cinnamon. Stew slowly until perfectly soft.
A straightforward salted-then-stewed green tomato pickle, scaled for a household putting up the last of the unripe crop. The proportions are sound; the vagueness is all in the volumes and the keeping.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is eight dry quarts, which for green tomatoes comes to something on the order of 12 lb. That fills a large stockpot once sliced, and the finished chow-chow will likely run to several pints, though the recipe gives no yield.
- The cup of saltUse coarse pickling or kosher salt, not iodised table salt, which clouds the brine and can darken the pickle. A cup of coarse salt weighs considerably less than a cup of fine, so if you only have fine salt, cut it back by about a third.
- "Turn off the water"The overnight salting draws a great deal of liquid out of the tomatoes; drain it away completely and give the slices a brief rinse and a press, or the finished pickle will be aggressively salty.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 percent acidity cider or white vinegar. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied wildly, and some was much weaker; modern bottled vinegar is the safer and more consistent choice here since the acid is doing the preserving.
- Whole clovesTie the tablespoon of whole cloves in a square of muslin or a spice ball and lift it out at the end. Left loose, they turn up whole on the fork and are unpleasantly medicinal to bite into.
- HorseradishA cup of freshly grated horseradish root is meant. Prepared horseradish from a jar is already in vinegar and much milder; if that is all you have, drain it and expect a gentler result. Grate the fresh root in a well-ventilated spot.
- "Stew slowly until perfectly soft"Reckon on 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, stirring now and then so the bottom does not catch. The tomatoes should be translucent and the liquid syrupy rather than watery.
- Keeping itThe recipe gives no sealing instructions, which is common in printed pickle recipes of this kind. Pack it into clean jars, cool, and keep it refrigerated; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath process for pickled vegetables rather than this text.
Chow-chow belongs to the family of mixed vegetable pickles that American households made every autumn, and green tomatoes were a classic salvage crop. The name is generally traced to the pidgin trade English of the China coast, where chow-chow meant a mixture or assortment; it attached itself in the nineteenth century to both the Anglo-Indian mustard pickle and the sweet-sour relishes of Pennsylvania and the American South. Compilations of this sort carried whole sections of such condiments because a winter table of salt meat, root vegetables and bread wanted something sharp alongside it, and because a peck of unripe tomatoes was otherwise waste.