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French Pickles
One peck green tomatoes chopped; sprinkle a little salt over them, let them stand over night, drain quite dry, cook until tender, then strain through a colander; add one head cabbage, two heads celery, one-half dozen green peppers, cabbage, peppers and celery all to be chopped fine; one gallon vinegar, one pound brown sugar, small box mustard, one-half cup grated horse-radish; scald together and pour on tomatoes.
A green-tomato chow-chow scaled for a farm household. The quantities are enormous by modern standards, and two of them need translating before you shop.
- A peck of green tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, which works out to roughly 12-13 lb of tomatoes. Quartering the whole recipe gives about 3 lb of tomatoes to 1 quart of vinegar and produces a manageable few pints.
- "Small box mustard"This means dry mustard powder, sold in tins and cardboard boxes of varying size in this period. The amount is genuinely ambiguous; 1/4 cup per quarter batch is assertive but in keeping with the horseradish and peppers.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5% acidity cider or white vinegar. Nineteenth-century household vinegar was inconsistent in strength, so the acidity of the original result cannot be assumed.
- The overnight saltingThis is the hinge. Salting draws water out of green tomatoes so the finished relish is not thin and weeping. Drain hard, and press the pulp in the colander rather than just letting it sit.
- "Strain through a colander"Not a fine strain. A colander holds back skins and seeds while the softened pulp goes through, giving a coarse relish rather than a sauce.
- Green peppersHalf a dozen most likely means ordinary green sweet peppers rather than chiles. Seed and core them before chopping.
- ScaldingBring the vinegar, sugar, mustard and horseradish to a bare simmer to dissolve the sugar and bloom the mustard, then pour over the drained tomato pulp and cabbage mixture. Long boiling dulls the horseradish heat.
- Yield and keepingThe full recipe makes a very large batch, comfortably more than two gallons. Treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and use it within a month or so; the recipe gives no processing times or sealing instructions, so do not attempt shelf-stable canning without a current tested procedure.
- ServingA condiment, not a side dish. It belongs beside cold meat, sausage, or beans.
Recipes like this exist because of frost. A gardener facing a killing night stripped the vines of everything still green, and the resulting glut of hard, sour tomatoes went into pickle rather than the compost heap; green-tomato relishes appear frequently in late nineteenth-century American household books for that reason. The name "French pickles" seems to have been applied loosely in period cookbooks to mixed, finely chopped, mustard-spiked pickles, as distinct from whole cucumbers in brine; the family is the same one that produced chow-chow and piccalilli, and the connection to France is generally treated as a matter of fashion in naming rather than any documented origin. The mustard, horseradish and celery here do double duty, seasoning a bland vegetable and adding bite to a mixture meant to keep.