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Tomato Pickles
Take tomatoes two thirds ripe when they begin to get a little red; prick them with a silver fork in several places, put them in a strong brine and let them remain eight days; then put them in vinegar, if strong must be reduced with one third water, let them remain twenty-four hours, remove them from this and put them in a stone jar; to a peck of tomatoes put two ounces mustard, one ounce ground cloves, one ounce ground pepper, laying alternately a layer of tomatoes and spice, pour on cold vinegar; they will be ready for use in one week. The brine should be prepared by putting in as much salt as will dissolve and bear up an egg.
The instructions are readable enough, but the preservation math behind them is not. Below, what the terms mean and why this particular method falls outside current safe-canning practice.
- Why it fails: unknown acidityThe recipe gives a dilution ('if strong must be reduced with one third water') but no measure of the starting vinegar's strength, and leaves the judgement of 'strong' to the cook. Tomatoes sit on the borderline between acid and low-acid foods and modern guidance requires added acid to hold them safe, so an unmeasured vinegar cut by an unverified amount leaves the finished pH anybody's guess. Current tested recipes specify 5 percent acidity vinegar and fix the vinegar-to-water ratio exactly.
- Why it fails: no heat, no sealNothing here is ever heated. Spiced tomatoes are layered cold into an open stone jar and topped with cold vinegar, then held at room temperature for a week and presumably much longer. There is no processing step, no hermetic seal, and no refrigeration — the three things that stand between a low-acid vegetable in a sealed anaerobic environment and Clostridium botulinum.
- Why it fails: the brine is measured by eggThe recipe gives two different descriptions of the same brine, 'as much salt as will dissolve' (saturation) and 'bear up an egg' (a float test that in practice indicates a brine well short of saturation), and neither tells you the actual concentration. An eight-day cure at an unverified salt concentration and an unrecorded room temperature is a curing step with no controls on it. Use a current tested pickle recipe instead.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts, about a quarter bushel — roughly 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes. It gives a sense of the scale the writer had in mind: this is a household putting up a crop, not making a jar.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock, open-topped or covered with a plate and a weight. It was the standard vessel for salting and pickling in bulk, valued because the vinegar would not attack it the way it attacked metal.
- The silver forkSilver, or a wooden skewer, was specified because ordinary iron forks reacted with the acid and blackened both the tool and the fruit. The pricking itself is real technique — it lets brine and vinegar penetrate a fruit whose skin would otherwise shed them.
- Two-thirds ripeTomatoes "when they begin to get a little red" are firm and still fairly acidic, which is why they were chosen — a fully ripe tomato collapses in brine. Ripeness varies the acidity of the finished pickle, which is another reason the vinegar cannot be left to guesswork.
Tomato pickles turn up constantly in American cookbooks of the middle and later nineteenth century, in both green and half-ripe versions, because a tomato crop ripens faster than a household can eat it and the tail end of the season leaves a great many fruits that will never come to full red. Long salt-brining followed by a vinegar and spice pack was the standard treatment for firm vegetables of every kind — cucumbers, walnuts, onions, martynia — and the spicing here, mustard with cloves and black pepper, is the ordinary pickling spice of the period rather than anything specific to tomatoes. The egg test for brine strength was common kitchen shorthand long before hydrometers were household items; a fresh egg floats with a coin-sized patch of shell showing when the brine is strong enough. What dates the recipe most clearly is what it leaves out: no jar sizes, no processing, no sealing. Reliable home canning in glass with a measured boiling-water process belongs to the decades that followed, and the crock in the cellar was what came before it.