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Chopped Pickles
Take a peck green tomatoes, wash clean, cut away a small piece from each end, slice and place in a large wooden bowl, chop fine, place in a crock and mix salt with them (half pint to a peck), let stand twenty-four hours, and drain thoroughly; take twice or three times as much cabbage as there is chopped tomatoes, chop fine, mix salt in same proportions, add enough water to make moist, and let stand same time as tomatoes; drain, place again in separate jars, cover each with cold weak vinegar; after twenty-four hours drain cabbage well, pressing hard to extract all the juice; place tomatoes and the vinegar in a porcelain kettle and let them boil for three minutes, stirring all the time, pour out, and when cold, place in a towel and wring and press until perfectly dry; now mix tomatoes and cabbage together, take a double handful at a time, squeeze as tightly as possible, and place in a dry crock; take the stone jar in which they are to be pickled, place in it a layer of tomatoes and cabbage, scatter over with chopped peppers, whole mustard seed, and horse-radish, then another layer of tomatoes and cabbage, next spice, and so on until jar is almost full, occasionally sprinkling with cayenne pepper; cover with strong cider vinegar, to each gallon of which a tea-cup of sugar has been added. Place a saucer or pieces of broken china on the pickles to keep them under the vinegar. If a white scum rises, drain off vinegar, boil, skim, and pour hot over the pickles. Prepare mustard, peppers, and horse-radish, as follows: Take three green or ripe garden peppers (four table-spoons when chopped), cut in two, place in salt water over night, the next morning drain and chop quite fine; to two table-spoons mustard-seed add salt-spoon salt, pour in boiling water, let stand fifteen minutes and drain; two table-spoons horse-radish chopped fine. Tomatoes and onions are excellent prepared in the same way. For sliced pickles, take cucumbers and onions, or tomatoes and onions, and slice and prepare as above. - Mrs. W. W. W.
This is a chow-chow in all but name, and the original quantities are farm-scale. Read the whole thing before starting, because the salting, draining and pressing take three days before any spice goes in.
- The hinge is drynessEvery squeeze, wring and press in this recipe exists to get water out so the finishing vinegar stays at full strength. If the vegetables go into the crock wet, the vinegar is diluted, the pickle turns slack and it will not keep.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts, which for green tomatoes runs somewhere around 12-13 lb. With two to three times that volume of cabbage on top, the raw vegetable alone is several gallons before any pressing, so the full recipe needs a very large crock. A quarter batch is more realistic.
- Salt and small spoonsHalf a pint of salt is a full cup, and it is meant to be drawn back out at the draining stage rather than eaten. A salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon; a tea-cup here is about three-quarters of a cup.
- Weak and strong vinegar"Cold weak vinegar" is the soaking liquid and can be cut roughly half and half with water. The vinegar that covers the finished pickle should be undiluted cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is what modern bottles carry; do not water it down or substitute a low-acid specialty vinegar.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamel-lined or stainless pan. Bare cast iron, aluminium and unlined copper react with vinegar and will darken the pickle and taint the flavour.
- Three minutes means three minutesThe boil for the tomatoes is brief on purpose. Longer and the chopped green tomato collapses, which defeats the wringing-dry step that follows.
- Green tomatoesUse hard, fully unripe fruit, not merely underripe pink ones. Ripening tomatoes go to mush under salt and pressing.
- Storage and the white scumThe instruction to drain, boil and re-pour the vinegar when scum appears belongs to a cool cellar and constant attention. Keep the finished jars in the refrigerator instead, weighted so nothing sits above the vinegar, and discard the batch if it smells yeasty, goes soft or shows mould rather than trying to rescue it.
- Heat level"Three green or ripe garden peppers" is not specific about variety or heat, and the recipe's own heat is added separately as cayenne sprinkled between layers. Add that by taste as you build the jar.
Chopped pickle of this kind - cabbage, green tomatoes, mustard seed, horseradish and hot pepper layered under spiced vinegar - is the American relish generally called chow-chow. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by churchwomen who are credited only by initials, devotes many pages to pickles because a household that grew its own produce had to convert a glut into something that would sit in a cellar crock until spring. The three days of salting, draining and pressing here are not fussiness but preservation: salt draws water out of the vegetables, and what water remains would otherwise dilute the vinegar below the strength that keeps the crock sound. The closing line - that tomatoes and onions, or cucumbers and onions, do just as well - is characteristic of the book, which treats a recipe as a method to be pointed at whatever the garden actually produced.