Home › Village Receipts › Piccalilli (One peck of green tomatoes)
Piccalilli (One peck of green tomatoes)
One peck of green tomatoes, one-half dozen of small onions, one-half dozen of green peppers, one-half pint of salt; chop tomatoes, onions, and peppers together until fine enough, stir in the salt and let it stand over night. In the morning drain through a colander, cover with vinegar and cook slowly one hour; then add one pound of sugar, one teaspoon of ground cloves, one-fourth cup of ground mustard seed, and vinegar enough to mix. Let it come to a boil.
— Mrs. Henry M. Miner
A late-season green tomato relish, sized for a household that expected to put up a winter's worth at once. The quantities are in dry measure and will need scaling for most modern kitchens.
- A peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. Quartering the recipe gives about 3 lb of tomatoes and a manageable pot.
- Half a pint of saltThat is one cup, and it is a dry-salting cure rather than seasoning — most of it drains away overnight with the tomato liquid. Use coarse pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt can cloud the brine and darken the vegetables.
- "Small onions" and "green peppers"Six of each, unspecified in size. Read them as six ordinary yellow onions and six green bell peppers, which is about 1½ lb of each against a full peck of tomatoes.
- Fine enoughThe chopping would have been done by hand, in a bowl with a chopping knife or with a hand-cranked chopper, either of which leaves coarse, distinct pieces. A food processor works if you pulse in batches and stop short of a puree; a relish ground to paste turns muddy.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied; modern bottled vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what you want here, and is what keeps the relish safe. Do not dilute it with water to soften the bite.
- Cook slowly one hourA bare simmer, uncovered, until the tomatoes lose their raw opacity and the liquid has reduced. Sugar and spices go in only after that hour; added early the sugar scorches on the bottom of the pot.
- Sugar and mustardOne pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups. A quarter cup of ground mustard seed is a substantial amount — use dry mustard powder or freshly ground yellow mustard seed, not prepared mustard.
- Yield and keepingA full peck gives roughly 7 to 8 pints. The receipt stops at "let it come to a boil" and says nothing about sealing. Either refrigerate and eat it within a few weeks, or follow current tested boiling-water canning directions for a tomato relish if you intend to store it on a shelf.
Piccalilli appears in English cookbooks in the eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian mixed pickle — early receipts spell it "paco-lilla" and similar — though the origin of the word itself is obscure and is sometimes explained simply as a fanciful extension of "pickle." American versions include this kind of chopped, mustard-spiced pickle built on green tomatoes, that is, on the fruit still hanging on the vines when a hard frost was forecast; salting the unripe crop overnight was one way of using it up before winter. Its appearance in a cookbook signed with a contributor's married name is typical of the community collections compiled to raise money for a church or library — the recipes are shorthand between neighbors who already knew what a peck looked like.