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Pottsville Pickle
1 quarts green tomatoes 1½ quarts ripe tomatoes 2 onions 3 ripe peppers without the seeds Chop the vegetables; sprinkle with half a cup of salt and let stand over night. Drain and add one quart of vinegar, half a teaspoonful of cloves, half a teaspoonful of cinnamon, half a teaspoonful of mustard seed, and two cups of sugar. Cook until tomato is tender. 12 large onions 12 large green peppers
A green tomato relish of the chow-chow family, typeset badly enough that two of its numbers are unusable. Read the notes before shopping.
- The quantitiesThe printed page gives one quart of green tomatoes and one and a half quarts of ripe, and our text now matches it. The ripe tomatoes outweigh the green, so salt to the total volume of chopped vegetables rather than to either figure alone.
- The stray last line"12 large onions 12 large green peppers" reads as a fragment of another recipe rather than part of this one; twelve onions would swamp a quart of tomatoes. Ignore it.
- Ripe peppersMost likely sweet peppers left on the plant until red rather than chiles. Three red bells, seeds and ribs removed, is the probable intent.
- Half a cup of saltThat is a drawing salt, not a seasoning. It pulls water out of the chopped vegetables overnight so the finished pickle is not soupy, and most of it leaves with the drained brine. Drain well and press lightly; do not rinse unless the mixture tastes aggressively salty.
- SpicesAssume ground cloves and ground cinnamon at the given half-teaspoons, and whole yellow mustard seed. If you substitute whole cloves, use three or four rather than a half-teaspoon, which would dominate everything else.
- "Cook until tomato is tender"Simmer uncovered, stirring, about 30 to 45 minutes. Green tomatoes hold their shape stubbornly; the mixture is done when a piece crushes easily against the side of the pan and the syrup has thickened enough that a spoon drawn through the bottom leaves a brief track.
- StorageNo processing or sealing instruction is given at all. Keep it in the refrigerator and eat it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested procedure for a comparable tomato relish if you want shelf-stable jars.
- YieldHard to state given the ambiguous tomato quantities, but with a full quart of vinegar in the pot expect at least four half-pints and possibly more. It is a condiment relish, served by the spoonful with pork, beans, or cold meat.
Green tomato pickles and relishes were a common end-of-season answer to a vine full of fruit that would never colour before frost, and American preserving books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry many of them under names like chow-chow, piccalilli, or simply "green tomato pickle." If the name points to Pottsville in the Pennsylvania coal country -- there are other Pottsvilles, and the recipe itself says nothing about origin -- the sweet-sour balance here, two cups of sugar against a quart of vinegar, with cloves and cinnamon rather than turmeric or curry, would sit comfortably with Pennsylvania German sweet pickling rather than the British-derived piccalillis. Place names attached to recipes in community books of this kind often record where the compiler got the recipe rather than any documented local origin, so the attribution should not be pressed far.