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Green Tomato Pickle
Take eight pounds of green tomatoes and chop fine, add four pounds brown sugar and boil down three hours, add a quart of vinegar, a teaspoon each of mace, cinnamon and cloves, and boil about fifteen minutes; let cool and put into jars or other vessels. Try this recipe once and you will try it again. -Mrs. W. A. Croffut, New York City.
A sweet spiced tomato preserve closer to chutney than to a brined pickle. The three-hour boil is the whole recipe: it drives off the water the tomatoes give up and concentrates the sugar, and it needs a heavy pot and attention near the end.
- Green means unripeThese are hard, pale, unripened tomatoes picked before frost, not green-when-ripe varieties like Green Zebra. Unripe fruit holds its shape and brings the tartness the sugar is working against.
- Scale and yieldEight pounds of tomatoes with four pounds of sugar is a large batch, roughly four to six pints depending on how far it is reduced. Halve or quarter it comfortably; the timing shortens as the volume drops, so judge by thickness rather than the clock.
- The three-hour boilUse a wide, heavy-bottomed preserving pan and keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil. As the mixture thickens past the two-hour mark the sugar will catch and scorch on the base, so stir often and lower the heat further toward the end.
- Chop, do not puree"Chop fine" means knife-fine, about a quarter inch. A food processor turns the tomatoes to slurry, which cooks down to a flat, jam-like paste with none of the texture the dish depends on.
- VinegarA quart is 4 cups. Use ordinary 5 percent cider or white vinegar; the fifteen-minute boil after it goes in is meant to marry it, not reduce it further.
- SpicesA teaspoon each of ground mace, cinnamon and cloves. Ground cloves in particular dominate quickly, so add them at the end as written rather than at the start of the long boil.
- StorageThe recipe stops at cooling and jarring, which was adequate for a cellar and a cool larder but is not shelf-stable canning. Refrigerate the filled jars and use within a couple of months, or follow current tested water-bath processing times for a sweet tomato pickle if you want it on a shelf.
- ServingTreat it as a condiment rather than a pickle plate: it suits cold roast pork, ham, sharp cheese and cold cuts, the usual company for sweet pickles of this kind.
Sweet pickles occupy a substantial section of Buckeye Cookery (1877), and green tomato recipes appear there for a practical reason: a tomato patch produced far more fruit than could ripen before the first hard frost, and boiling the unripe remainder down with sugar, vinegar and sweet spices turned a loss into a winter relish. The formula, heavy on sugar and warm spice, follows the pattern of Anglo-American "sweet pickles" and mangoes, which are conventionally traced to the spiced fruit chutneys British cooks encountered in India. Like much of the book, this one arrives as a signed contribution from a named housekeeper, in this case a Mrs. W. A. Croffut of New York City, and it keeps her closing endorsement intact, which is a fair reminder that Buckeye Cookery was assembled from many contributors rather than written by a single author.