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Pepper Snap
Twelve red peppers, twelve green peppers, twelve large onions or forty-eight small ones, two tablespoons of salt, three-quarters of a cup of sugar, one quart of vinegar; chop fine after removing seeds of peppers; scald for ten minutes, then drain, add boiling water and scald for ten minutes longer; then drain and add vinegar, sugar and salt, and boil for fifteen minutes.
— Mrs. Wm. J. Reed
One peck of green tomatoes, sliced the day before you are ready for pickling; sprinkle them through and through with salt, not too heavily; in the morning drain off the liquor that will drain from them. Have a dozen good-sized onions rather coarsely sliced, take a suitable kettle and put in a layer of the sliced tomatoes, then onions, and between each layer sprinkle the following: six sweet red peppers chopped coarsely, one cup of sugar, one tablespoonful of ground allspice, one tablespoon of ground cinnamon, a teaspoon of cloves, one tablespoon of mustard; turn over three pints of good vinegar or enough to completely cover them; boil until tender. the flavor of the onions is objectionable, the pickles are equally as good without them.
— Mrs. Chas. J. Bagley
Two late-summer pickling receipts run together here: a pepper relish (what many cookbooks of the era call pepper hash) and a sweet green tomato pickle. Both are straightforward, but the units and the preserving assumptions need translating.
- Which peppers"Red peppers" and "green peppers" in a community book of this kind most likely mean sweet bell-type peppers rather than chiles; the green tomato recipe says "sweet red peppers" outright. If you want heat, add it deliberately rather than assuming the original intended it.
- The double scald is the pointChopped peppers and onions are covered with boiling water, held ten minutes, drained, then scalded again. This is what takes the raw sulphurous bite out of the onion and softens the pepper skins. Skipping it gives a harsh, watery relish, no matter how long you boil it in vinegar afterward.
- A peckA peck of green tomatoes is roughly 12 to 13 lb, about a quarter bushel. A dozen "good-sized" onions is loosely 4 to 6 lb.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period varied; modern cider or white vinegar is standardised at 5 percent acidity, which is what any current pickling guidance assumes. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid wine or fruit vinegar.
- SaltThe two tablespoons were probably measured with a coarse pickling or dairy salt. Measured by volume, modern fine table salt is considerably saltier; use pickling or kosher salt by weight if you can, and note that iodised salt can cloud the brine.
- Overnight salting of the tomatoesThe green tomatoes are salted the night before and drained in the morning. That liquor is discarded, not added back; it carries off water so the pickle finishes firm rather than slack.
- Storage, which the recipe omitsNeither receipt says anything about jars or sealing. Treat both as refrigerator pickles, kept cold and eaten within a few weeks. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath recipe with its own quantities and processing time rather than this one.
- Yield and useBoth are large batches: the pepper relish and the tomato pickle each run to several quarts. Both were table condiments for cold meat, sausage, beans and bread, served in a small dish alongside rather than as a salad.
The Catskill Cook Book belongs to the great wave of American community cookbooks compiled by church guilds, aid societies and village clubs, in which each receipt carries the name of the woman who contributed it — Mrs. Wm. J. Reed, Mrs. Chas. J. Bagley — as both credit and guarantee. Both look like September recipes: the pepper relish uses the flush of sweet peppers at the end of the season, and the green tomato pickle suggests fruit on the vines that would never ripen before frost. Relishes of chopped pepper, onion and vinegar were widely known as pepper hash or pepper relish across the mid-Atlantic and are generally traced to Pennsylvania German pickling habits, and they sit alongside the chow-chow and piccalilli family of sweet-sour condiments. The closing line — that the pickles are equally good without the onions if their flavour is objectionable — is the authentic voice of the genre: a neighbour writing for other cooks, not an editor writing for strangers.