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Ripe Tomato Pickle
Pare and weigh ripe tomatoes and put into jars and just cover with vinegar; after standing three days pour off the vinegar and add five pounds coffee sugar to every seven of fruit; spice to taste and pour over tomatoes and cook slowly all day on the back of the stove. Use cinnamon, mace and a little cloves, or not any, as preferred.
A sweet pickle in the old sense: fruit steeped in vinegar, then cooked down in a heavy sugar syrup until it takes on a preserve-like body. The scale is large and the timing is vague, so a few numbers help.
- The proportionSeven pounds of pared tomatoes to five pounds of sugar, with vinegar just to cover. Scaling to 3 1/2 lb tomatoes and 2 1/2 lb sugar makes a manageable half batch; the yield depends on how far it is cooked down.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-crystal grade of sugar sold for sweetening coffee in this period, often slightly off-white rather than fully refined. Ordinary granulated sugar is the practical replacement, weight for weight.
- PareHere it means skin them, not trim them. Dip in boiling water for 20-30 seconds and the skins slip off; then weigh, since the weight given is of the peeled fruit.
- Which tomatoesSmall, firm, meaty fruit holds its shape through the long cooking. Plum or paste types are best; large slicing tomatoes collapse into sauce.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied a great deal. Use a commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity so the three-day steep actually acidifies the fruit. The text is ambiguous about the poured-off vinegar: it may be discarded, or it may be the liquid that the sugar and spice go into before it is poured back over the tomatoes.
- "Back of the stove" and "all day"The coolest zone of a wood range, which would have held the pot at little more than a bare simmer. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting with the lid off; expect several hours, until the syrup sheets off a spoon and the tomatoes are translucent. Stir occasionally; the sugar concentration climbs and scorches easily at the end.
- SpicingTie cinnamon stick, blade mace and a few cloves in cheesecloth and lift them out when the flavor is where you want it. Ground spice over this many hours turns muddy and clouds the syrup. Cloves dominate quickly, which is why the original says "a little."
- Keeping itThe text says nothing about how the finished pickle was kept. Store it in the refrigerator, or follow current water-bath canning directions for a tested tomato pickle, since this recipe gives no sterilizing or sealing procedure.
Buckeye Cookery came out of 1870s Ohio. Midwestern gardens produced more than a family could eat fresh, and the sweet-pickle chapter is often said to be where the surplus went: fruit and vegetables held in vinegar, then candied slowly in sugar syrup with warm spice, to be served alongside cold meat. The style is essentially English sweet pickling adapted to cheap American sugar, and it sits halfway between what we would now call a chutney and a preserve. The call for "coffee sugar" is a reminder that sugar was then bought by grade rather than by brand, the grades differing chiefly in refinement and colour, and that a cook was expected to know which she meant. The instruction to cook "on the back of the stove" belongs entirely to the wood range, where a cooling firebox gave hours of gentle heat that cost nothing extra.