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Sweet Pickled Tomatoes
One-half bushel of green tomatoes sliced, six onions sliced; strew a cup of salt over and let them remain over night, drain off in the morning, then take two quarts of water and one quart vinegar, boil them in this fifteen or twenty minutes; after boiling, put them in a sieve to drain, then take four quarts vinegar, onehalf pound white mustard seed, four pounds coffee sugar, two tablespoons ground alspice, two tablespoons cinnamon, two tablespoons ginger, two tablespoons mustard, one tablespoon ground cloves, one teaspoon cayenne pepper; put all in a kettle, cook slowly for about thirty minutes.
A classic end-of-season green tomato pickle, written for a farm household putting up a half bushel at a time. The proportions are sound; the scale and the storage instructions are what need attention.
- Scale it down firstA half bushel of green tomatoes is roughly 25-30 lb, and the finished batch will run to several gallons. Dividing everything by eight gives about 3 lb of tomatoes, one onion, 2 tablespoons salt, 1 cup water plus 1/2 cup vinegar for the parboil, 2 cups vinegar for the pickling syrup, 1 oz white mustard seed, 8 oz sugar, roughly 3/4 teaspoon each of allspice, cinnamon, ginger and mustard, a scant 1/2 teaspoon cloves (the original gives cloves at half the rate of the others), and a pinch of cayenne.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-crystal granulated sugar sold under that name in the period. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight.
- Two kinds of mustardThe recipe calls for both white mustard seed (whole, for texture and mild heat) and "mustard," meaning dry ground mustard powder. They are not interchangeable here.
- SaltUse pickling or plain kosher salt. Iodized table salt clouds the brine and anti-caking agents leave a haze; a cup of fine table salt is also considerably saltier by volume than the coarse salt intended.
- The overnight saltingThis is the step that keeps the slices from going limp. Drain thoroughly in the morning and do not rinse away all the salt unless the batch tastes aggressively salty on a raw slice.
- Use a non-reactive kettleFour quarts of vinegar simmered thirty minutes will pit bare cast iron, aluminium and unlined copper, and pick up a metallic taste and grey colour. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Vinegar strengthModern bottled cider and white vinegar are standardised at 5 percent acidity, which is what makes this style of pickle keep. Do not dilute the four quarts of pickling vinegar, and do not substitute a low-acid artisanal vinegar.
- StorageThe original stops at the kettle and assumes crocks or hot jars in a cool cellar. Pack the hot pickle into clean jars, cool, and keep it refrigerated, where it will hold for months. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water canning process for pickled green tomatoes rather than this text, which gives no jar or processing instructions.
- ServingA sharp, sweet relish-style pickle meant alongside cold meat, cheese and bread at supper. It improves after two or three weeks.
Green tomato pickles were a fixture of American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward for a purely practical reason: frost. A killing night ended the tomato crop with most of the fruit still hard and green, and a household that had planted for the whole summer was left with bushels of something inedible raw. Salting overnight, parboiling in dilute vinegar, then simmering in a sweet spiced syrup turned the whole lot into a keeping condiment. The spice list here -- allspice, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mustard, cayenne -- is the standard sweet-pickle profile of the period, closely related to the chow-chows and piccalillis of the same books, and its warmth owes a good deal to British and Anglo-Indian pickle traditions. A pickle made in such quantity was kept for the kind of meal often described as the cold, informal end of the day -- bread, cheese, sliced meat and whatever the pickle crock held -- though the pattern varied by region, season, and whether the main meal fell at midday.