Home › Pickles › Ripe Tomato Pickles
Ripe Tomato Pickles
Pare ripe, sound tomatoes (do not scald), put in a jar; scald spices (tied in a bag) in vinegar, and pour while hot over them. This recipe is best for persons who prefer raw tomatoes.
This is a raw-pack pickle with no measured quantities, no vinegar strength and no heat processing of any kind. It cannot be brought into line with current preserving practice by adjusting a time or a temperature, so the notes below explain what fails rather than how to fix it.
- Tomatoes are not a high-acid vegetableTomatoes sit right on the acidity borderline -- published figures for ripe tomatoes generally fall between about pH 4.0 and 4.6, and some varieties, over-ripe fruit and low-acid types can test at or above 4.6, the threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Tested tomato preserves today specify added bottled lemon juice or citric acid for exactly this reason; this recipe specifies nothing.
- No vinegar strength givenNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acetic acid content, and cider vinegar made at home could be well under 4 percent. Without a stated strength and a stated ratio of vinegar to tomato, there is no way to know the final acidity of the jar.
- Hot vinegar is not a processPouring scalding vinegar over cold raw fruit in a jar heats the outer surface and little else. There is no boiling-water bath, no time, no seal specified, and no instruction to refrigerate, which leaves the contents in the range where spoilage organisms and yeasts multiply.
- Whole raw fruit, not slicesThe tomatoes go in pared but intact, so acid has to penetrate the whole fruit by diffusion. The interior can remain effectively unacidified for a long period even when the surrounding liquid is sharp.
- "Do not scald"The instruction means do not blanch the tomatoes to loosen the skins, which is the usual peeling method. The whole point of the recipe is that the fruit stays raw and firm, which is also what makes it unsafe to keep.
- The spice bagSpices tied in a cloth bag and simmered in the vinegar were the standard way to flavour a pickle liquor without leaving whole cloves and peppercorns in the jar. That part of the technique is sound and still used; the packing method is not.
- If you want this flavourUse a current tested recipe for pickled tomatoes from a food-safety authority or an up-to-date preserving manual, one that gives added acid, ratios and a processing time.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from Ohio housewives' contributions, and its pickle chapter reflects a late-summer glut of tomatoes with no refrigeration to fall back on. Vinegar was understood empirically as a preservative long before anyone could measure pH, and a great many household recipes of the period simply assumed that anything covered in vinegar would keep -- an assumption that worked more often with cucumbers and onions than with soft, near-neutral fruit. The closing line, that the recipe suits "persons who prefer raw tomatoes," suggests that not every reader took the raw tomato for granted; the tomato is often said to have spent decades under suspicion as a nightshade, though that story is more repeated tradition than documented practice, and tomatoes were in fact widely grown and eaten in America well before the 1870s.