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Tomatoes, Pickled
This pickle is very good with roast meat, cold or hot. Take two dozen small ripe tomatoes; prick each one in two or three places, carefully preserve the juice that flows from them, and keep it in a covered vessel until wanted. Put the tomatoes in layers in a deep earthen jar, and sprinkle a little salt between each layer. Cover the jar, and let the tomatoes remain undisturbed for three days. At the end of that time wash them well from the brine and dry them carefully. Put them into jars, and cover them with vinegar which has been boiled and allowed to get cold. Add the juice which flowed from the fruit in the first instance, and cover the jars closely. The pickle will be ready for use in about a fortnight. The following spices should be boiled with the vinegar for this quantity of tomatoes. Half an ounce of pepper, half an ounce of cloves, and a heaped table-spoonful of mustard-seed. Sometimes minced onions or minced celery, or both, are put into the jars with the tomatoes. Time, four days.
This is a raw-pack, unprocessed pickle, and the specific problems are with the acid balance and the unrefrigerated salting stage rather than with anything exotic in the ingredient list.
- The salt cure is unmeasured"A little salt" sprinkled between layers, with the jar left covered at room temperature for three days, gives no way to know whether the brine ever reaches a concentration that suppresses spoilage organisms. A dry salt cure of this kind depends entirely on quantity, and the original supplies none.
- Tomatoes are not reliably acidTomatoes sit close to the boundary that separates acid from low-acid foods, and some cultivars fall on the wrong side of it. This recipe treats them as if they were as safe as cucumbers in vinegar; current guidance treats tomato products as needing added acid and measured processing.
- The reserved juice dilutes the vinegarThe instruction to add back the raw juice that ran from the pricked fruit is the hinge of the recipe, and it is also the fault. It reintroduces untreated, low-acid liquid into the jar after the vinegar has been boiled and cooled, lowering the acidity of the pack by an unknown amount.
- Closed jars, no heat treatmentJars "covered closely" and left for a fortnight, with no boiling-water bath and no stated storage temperature, create exactly the low-oxygen, marginal-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin. Nothing in the method brings the sealed contents to a temperature that would matter.
- Onion and celery make it worseThe optional minced onion or celery are both low-acid vegetables added raw to the jar. They raise the pH of the pack further and bring soil organisms with them.
- On the archaic quantitiesHalf an ounce each of pepper and cloves is roughly two tablespoons of whole spice apiece, and the "deep earthen jar" is a glazed earthenware crock rather than a modern canning jar. The "Time, four days" at the foot appears to cover the salting and draining stage rather than the fortnight of steeping, though it does not match the three days the recipe itself specifies.
- If you want pickled tomatoesUse a current tested recipe with weighed salt, a stated vinegar strength and a measured processing time, or make a refrigerator pickle that is eaten within a week or two and never sealed for storage.
Cassell's places this among a run of vinegar pickles meant for the cold sideboard, where a sharp preserve was expected alongside roast and cold meats at a time when fresh salad vegetables were seasonal and dear. Pickled tomatoes belong to the period when the tomato was still settling into British cookery: long grown under glass and, by a much-repeated tradition, treated with suspicion as a member of the nightshade family, it became common in English kitchens only through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, arriving first as sauce, ketchup and pickle rather than as something eaten raw. The technique here — pricking the whole fruit, then covering with spiced vinegar boiled and cooled — is one common Victorian formula, and its transfer to the tomato was made on the assumption that all pickled vegetables behave the same way in the jar. That assumption is the reason the recipe reads confidently and still does not work by modern standards.