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Sweet Pickle of Tomato
One peck of firm, smooth, green tomatoes, ten large white onions. Slice with an even thickness the tomatoes and the onions. Place a layer of tomatoes, generously deep, in an earthen crock, next a layer of onions, with liberal sprinklings of salt. When all are used, cover and weight heavily; let stand over night.
In the morning drain and rinse with clear cold water; then place in the preserving crock, in layers besprinkled with three coffee cups of brown sugar, two teaspoonfuls, each, of mace, allspice, pounded cloves, celery seed, and mustard seed, and one of finely-pounded cinnamon. Add of purest vinegar a quantity which will cause it to be palatable to those who are to partake of it, as tastes differ greatly. Boil until a thick syrup forms, then place in earthen crocks and cover with a linen cloth before placing the earthen lid.
This is a nineteenth-century open-crock pickle, and the single instruction that governs its safety — how much vinegar — is left entirely to the cook's palate. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method cannot be followed today.
- The vinegar is unmeasured, and that is the problemOnions are a low-acid vegetable and green tomatoes sit close to the borderline, so preservation here depends on the added acetic acid, yet the recipe asks only for "a quantity which will cause it to be palatable." Three cups of brown sugar can mask a good deal of sourness, so a batch may still taste sharp without reliably reaching a pH below 4.6, the point at which Clostridium botulinum is inhibited. A current tested pickle recipe with a stated vinegar-to-vegetable ratio and a stated acidity should be used instead.
- Vinegar strength has changedHousehold and homemade vinegars of the period varied widely in strength and were not standardised at the 5 percent acetic acid sold now. A period cook adding vinegar by taste had no way to know what acidity she had achieved, and neither would anyone reproducing this.
- Crock storage under a cloth is not preservingThe finished pickle goes into earthen crocks covered with linen and an earthen lid — no seal, no heat processing, no exclusion of air. This is a cool-cellar method that assumed rapid consumption and constant low temperature. In a modern kitchen it is simply an open container of low-acid vegetables held at room temperature.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. With ten large onions this is a very large batch, sized for a household that put up food by the crock rather than the jar.
- A coffee cupIn American cookbooks of this era a coffee cup is generally taken as about one cup, sometimes a little less. Three of them is close to 1 1/2 lb of brown sugar.
- The overnight saltingThe layered salt and heavy weight draw water out of the tomatoes and onions so the syrup does not thin. This part of the technique is sound and survives in modern green tomato relishes, which give the salt as a stated, measured quantity.
- Mace and pounded spicesMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself; it is still sold ground. "Pounded" cloves and cinnamon simply means whole spices crushed in a mortar, though ground spices could also be bought.
Green tomato pickle was a thrift dish before it was a delicacy: at the end of the season a gardener was left with pounds of fruit that would never ripen, and sweet-spiced vinegar turned them into something that would sit on the winter table beside cold meat. The heavy hand with clove, allspice, mace and cinnamon marks it as belonging to the older English pickling tradition, where sweet pickles, chutneys and "mangoes" all drew on the same warm spice cabinet. Books of this type appeared in quantity as home canning was shifting from crocks and cellars toward glass jars and processing kettles u2014 and this recipe sits on the wrong side of that shift, with its earthen crock, its linen cover and its vinegar measured by nothing more than the taste "of those who are to partake of it."