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Green Tomatoes
To one gallon green tomatoes chopped fine and pressed as dry as possible, three peppers chopped, three onions chopped, one pint grated horse radish, one-half pint white mustard seed, one tablespoon black mustard seed, one tablespoon black pepper, two tablespoons cloves, one tablespoon allspice. Put in a jar and cover with cold vinegar.
A raw, cold-packed green tomato relish of the chow-chow family, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what it should taste like. The measurements are workable, but several of them need translating before you commit a gallon of tomatoes.
- A gallon of chopped tomatoesMeasured after chopping, that is roughly 7 to 8 lb of whole green tomatoes. Pressing will reduce the bulk appreciably, so the finished quantity will be well under a gallon.
- "Pressed as dry as possible"This is the hinge. Green tomatoes carry a great deal of water, and any that stays behind dilutes the vinegar and turns the jar cloudy and slack. Many period recipes of this type reach the same stage by layering the chopped tomatoes with salt overnight and draining them; this one gives no salt at all and no method for drying them out.
- Which peppers"Three peppers" is genuinely ambiguous. In American recipes of this kind it is often green bell peppers, but hot red peppers were written the same way. Bells give a mild relish; three chiles in a gallon would make it sharp.
- White mustard seedThe pale yellow seed sold today as yellow mustard seed. It is the mild one; the black mustard seed called for by the spoonful is much hotter, which is why the proportions are so lopsided.
- Cloves and allspiceTwo tablespoons of cloves is heavy if ground and reasonable if whole, which is the likelier reading. Whole spices throughout will also keep the relish clearer.
- The horseradishA pint of freshly grated root is a great deal, and it is the defining flavour here rather than a background note. Prepared horseradish from a jar is already vinegared and will substitute, though it is milder.
- The vinegarUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, cider or distilled. Older household vinegars varied widely in strength, and insufficient acidity is one way an unheated crock pickle can spoil. The tomatoes must stay fully submerged.
- StorageNothing here is heated or sealed, so this is a refrigerator pickle by modern standards, not a shelf-stable one. Keep it cold in a covered non-reactive jar and give it two to three weeks before eating so the mustard seed and horseradish come forward.
Green tomato pickles belong to the last week of the garden year: when frost was forecast, the unripened fruit came off the vines by the bushel and went into crocks rather than the compost. Recipes of this kind appear under a dozen names in nineteenth-century American books, chow-chow, piccalilli, mangoes, or simply "green tomato pickle," and they share a method of chopping, drying out and covering with cold spiced vinegar. What marks this one is the pint of horseradish, an unusually large amount that pushes it toward the sharp, mustard-and-root end of the relish family. A jar like this was what made a cold meal of meat and bread and cheese worth sitting down to.