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Green Tomato Sweet Pickles
1 peck green tomatoes 1 cup salt 2 quarts boiling water I quart vinegar 1 gallon cider vinegar 3½ pounds brown sugar 2 green pepper pods 3 red pepper pods 1 tablespoonful white mustard seed I cup cinnamon bark, mace blades, cloves, horseradish, celery seed, cardamon seed, etc., mixed to taste Remove and discard a thin slice from the blossom and stem ends of each tomato; cut the rest of the tomato in thin slices and sprinkle with the salt, then set aside over night. In the morning, drain, add the boiling water and vinegar, and boil fifteen minutes; then drain again. The next morning cook together, ten minutes, the gallon of vinegar, sugar, the peppers cut in narrow shreds, and the seeds and spices tied in a bag.
Add the tomatoes and let simmer one hour, stirring occasionally. Store in fruit jars. The syrup should cover the tomatoes.
A late-season sweet pickle written for cooks working in bulk with a dry-measure peck and a gallon jug of vinegar. The quantities scale down cleanly by half or quarter.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is eight dry quarts, which works out to roughly 12 to 13 pounds of green tomatoes. Halving the whole recipe gives a more manageable batch for a domestic pot.
- The blossom and stem endsThe instruction to cut away a thin slice at each end is not merely cosmetic. Blossom ends are generally said to carry enzymes that soften pickles, advice usually given for cucumbers, and removing them is thought to help the slices stay firm.
- Two separate vinegarsThe first quart of vinegar goes in with the boiling water and is drained away with it; only the gallon of cider vinegar stays in the finished pickle. Do not dilute that gallon.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar today is standardised at 5 percent acetic acid. Older cider vinegar varied, and some was stronger. Use a plain 5 percent cider vinegar and do not substitute a low-acid specialty or homemade vinegar of unknown strength.
- SaltUse pickling or plain kosher salt. Iodised table salt clouds the brine, and anti-caking agents leave sediment in the jars.
- A cup of whole spiceThat cup is whole bark, blades and seed, not ground - perhaps two to three ounces by weight, tied in a bag so it can be lifted out. Cardamom seed here means the seeds picked from green pods. Ground spice will cloud the syrup over the hour of simmering.
- Slice thickness and the hour of simmeringAn hour is a long simmer for thin slices. Cut them a generous quarter inch so they hold their shape, and stop when the slices are translucent and the syrup has thickened rather than running the clock out.
- Sealing the jars"Store in fruit jars" reflects a period when a hot pack into a hot jar was thought sufficient. Current practice for any pickle is to pack into clean jars, cover with hot syrup leaving half an inch of headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath according to a current tested pickle recipe. Follow that guidance rather than the original instruction.
- YieldThis is a large batch. Let it stand a month before opening; the spice and sugar need time to settle into the fruit.
Green tomato pickle is a thrift recipe: it exists because a frost was coming and the vines were still loaded with fruit that would never ripen. Sweet spiced pickles of this kind - fruit or hard vegetable held in a syrup of vinegar, brown sugar and whole spice - sit alongside the older English pickling tradition, including the stuffed melon and cucumber pickles called "mangoes," and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks carried many variants under names like sweet pickle, chow chow and sweet chutney. The open-ended spice list here, ending in "etc., mixed to taste," is characteristic of the period: cinnamon bark, mace blades, cloves and cardamom were kept whole, and the proportions were the cook's own. The measures tell you the same story about scale. A peck is a dry measure from the produce garden or the market wagon, not the grocery shelf, and a gallon of cider vinegar was an ordinary domestic purchase in a house that still put up its own winter stores.