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India Relish (Twelve large ripe tomatoes)
Twelve large ripe tomatoes (peeled), twelve sour apples, seven small onions, one red pepper and one cup of raisins; chop together, add one quart of vinegar, one pound sugar; boil one hour and seal in glass jars.
— Mrs. B. F. Conkling
This is an Anglo-Indian style sweet-sour chutney of the kind that filled every community cookbook around 1900. The cooking is straightforward; the preserving method is the problem, and it is the reason the recipe cannot be followed as printed.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal in glass jars" means ladling the hot relish into jars and closing them, trusting the heat of the contents to sterilise the jar and pull a vacuum. That method has been out of accepted practice for decades: it does not reliably sterilise the headspace or the lid, and seals formed this way fail silently during storage.
- The acidity is not establishedOnions and sweet or hot peppers are low-acid, tomatoes sit right at the borderline, and apples and raisins vary. A quart of vinegar of unstated strength across an unstated total volume gives no way to know the finished pH. Shelf-stable preserving depends on knowing that number, not on assuming it.
- Why that mattersClostridium botulinum spores survive an hour at boiling point and germinate in a sealed, oxygen-free jar that is not acid enough. Neither the sugar nor the hour of simmering addresses this. Use a current tested chutney or relish recipe with a specified processing time if you want jars for the pantry.
- Vinegar of the periodHousehold vinegar in 1900 was of no guaranteed strength; cider vinegar was frequently homemade and its acidity varied, so it could be well off the 5 percent standard sold today. Any recipe of this age that specifies simply "vinegar" is giving an unknown quantity of acid.
- "One red pepper"Genuinely ambiguous. It could mean a sweet red bell pepper or a small dried cayenne, and the two differ enormously in heat and in bulk. The shorthand suggests the writer expected the reader to know which was meant.
- Sour applesTart cooking apples of the sort grown for pies and sauce - Greening, Baldwin, later Granny Smith. They are wanted for acidity and for pectin as much as for flavour, and a sweet dessert apple is not a substitute.
- The hour of boilingAn hour reduces the mixture to a thick, dark, jammy relish rather than a chunky one. The chopping was done by hand or in a crank grinder, so the pieces started coarse; a food processor will give you pulp long before the hour is up.
"India relish" is one of the many American names - along with India pickle, chow-chow and simply chutney - for the sweet-sour, spiced fruit-and-vegetable preserves that entered British and then American cooking through trade with South Asia. By the late nineteenth century the connection to India was mostly nominal: the form had been thoroughly domesticated into a way of using up the September glut of tomatoes and windfall apples, with raisins and sugar standing in for the tamarind and palm sugar of the originals. Its appearance in a community cookbook, signed with a neighbour's name, shows the pattern such books preserve - a recipe circulating by hand and by conversation, written down in the shorthand of cooks who already knew how thick the pan should look and how full to fill the jar.