Tomato Relish
Twenty-four large, peeled ripe tomatoes, four green peppers chopped fine, four onions chopped, two tablespoons salt, four tablespoons sugar, four cups vinegar; boil three hours.
A plain cooked relish of the type that turned a late-summer tomato glut into something to put beside cold meat. The proportions are sound; the vagueness is all in the quantities and the keeping.
- What twenty-four tomatoes meansAssume large slicing tomatoes of about 6 oz each, so roughly 8-9 lb whole, closer to 7 lb once peeled and cored. Paste tomatoes give a thicker relish in less time because they carry less water.
- PeelingScore the skins, drop the tomatoes into boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then into cold water and the skins slip off. Cut out the cores and squeeze out most of the seed jelly unless you want a looser relish.
- Green peppersThese are green bell peppers, not chillies. Four medium is about 1 lb after seeding.
- VinegarFour cups is a lot of liquid, and it is what carries the three-hour boil. Use cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity; older household vinegars varied, and wine vinegars at 6 percent will read sharper.
- The three hoursThat is a reduction time, not a fixed rule. Keep it at a steady low boil, stir often as it thickens, and stop when a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track that fills in slowly. Depending on your tomatoes this may be two hours or four.
- PanUse stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Bare cast iron or aluminium will react with this much vinegar and give the relish a metallic edge and a grey cast.
- Salt and sugarTwo tablespoons of salt in this volume is moderate by modern taste; taste at the end and adjust, since the sweet-sour balance shifts as the liquid reduces.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 3 to 4 pints. The recipe gives no sealing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator relish: pack into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled for a few weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-canning recipe rather than this one.
- ServingSpoon it beside cold ham, tongue, cheese or a supper omelette.
Tomato relishes and "chow-chows" fill the supper and preserve chapters of American and British household books through the later nineteenth century. The word relish in this period was used broadly for anything savoury put on the table to sharpen plain food, covering everything from chopped pickles to potted fish. A recipe like this one belongs to the end-of-season economy of a kitchen garden: vinegar, salt and sugar together with a long boil were the whole preservation strategy, and the three-hour cook was as much about driving off water as about flavour.