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Rummage Pickles
3 quarts green tomatoes 1 quart ripe tomatoes 3 small bunches celery 3 large onions 3 red peppers 3 green peppers I large ripe cucumber 1 quart small green cucumbers cup salt 3 pints vinegar 2 pounds brown sugar 1 teaspoonful mustard 1 teaspoonful pepper 1 tablespoonful cinnamon Chop the vegetables; sprinkle with the salt and let stand over night; in the morning, drain, add the other ingredients, and mix thoroughly; store without cooking in half-pint jars, so that only a small portion need be opened at a time. 2 quarts red tomatoes peck green tomatoes I head cabbage 15 white onions IO large green cucumbers
This is a raw-packed mixed pickle from the era before tested canning procedures, and the method is the problem rather than the flavour. The notes below explain the specific failures and decode the transcription.
- No heat process at allThe vegetables are salted overnight, drained, mixed with vinegar and sugar, and sealed into jars cold. Nothing is ever brought to a temperature that destroys spoilage organisms, and nothing is processed in a boiling-water bath after filling.
- Low-acid vegetables in a sealed jarOnions, celery, peppers and cucumbers are all low-acid foods. Sealed cold into jars and held at room temperature without a known acid level, they may provide the oxygen-poor conditions in which Clostridium botulinum can grow; the risk cannot be ruled out here because the final acidity is unknown. Botulinum toxin is not detectable by smell or appearance.
- The acid is not measurableThree pints of vinegar against more than five quarts of chopped vegetables plus two pounds of sugar gives no way to know the final pH, and the vinegar's own strength is unstated. Household vinegar of the period varied widely in strength; modern pickling recipes specify 5 percent acidity for this reason.
- The salt quantity is missingThe text reads "cup salt" with the number lost in transcription. Since the overnight salting is the only preservative step before the vinegar goes in, an unknown salt weight makes the recipe unreproducible even on its own terms.
- The transcription is damagedEvery "I" in the ingredient list is the numeral 1, and "IO" is 10. The final five lines - 2 quarts red tomatoes, a peck of green tomatoes, cabbage, white onions, cucumbers - appear to be the opening of a different recipe that has been run together with this one; where they came from cannot be told from the text.
- Archaic unitsA peck, in that stray fragment, is eight dry quarts, on the order of 12 lb of tomatoes. The half-pint jars called for hold one cup each; the stated reasoning, that only a small portion need be opened at a time, suggests the pickle was not expected to keep long once broached.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe for green tomato relish or chow-chow from a source that specifies vinegar strength, headspace and boiling-water processing time.
"Rummage" pickle is the frugal end of the pickling year: the name is often explained, though the derivation is not documented, as a rummage through what the garden still holds when frost is coming, which is why green tomatoes and half-grown cucumbers dominate the list alongside one overgrown ripe cucumber that would be too seedy to serve any other way. It belongs to the same family as chow-chow, piccalilli and the various "end of season" or "garden" relishes that fill the preserving chapters of American household books, all of them chopped, salted overnight to draw water, then bound with sweetened spiced vinegar. The confident instruction to "store without cooking" reflects a period belief that vinegar and salt alone were sufficient preservatives; botulism was only identified as a hazard of home-canned vegetables in the early twentieth century, and standardised processing times for domestic canning did not become widely published in the United States until agricultural extension services took the work up in the 1910s and 1920s.