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Piccalilli (Chop fine one peck of green)
Chop fine one peck of green tomatoes, twelve large onions, four green peppers and three red peppers; add one cup of salt and let stand over night. In the morning drain off and add two quarts of water and one pint of vinegar; boil twenty minutes, then drain and add two quarts of vinegar, one pound of brown sugar, one-half pound of mustard seed, two tablespoons of ground cinnamon, one tablespoon each of ground cloves, ginger and allspice. Boil fifteen minutes and can.
— Mrs. Frank Tice
A classic end-of-season green tomato relish, scaled for a farm household. The quantities are large and the canning instructions are of their period; both need attention.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. Halving or quartering the whole recipe is sensible unless you have a preserving pan of 12 quarts or more.
- The saltUse pickling or kosher salt by weight rather than a measured cup of table salt. Iodized salt and anti-caking agents cloud the brine and can darken the vegetables. The overnight salting is what draws water out of the tomatoes; do not shorten it.
- The first boil is a purgeBoiling in water and a pint of vinegar, then draining, removes the harsh raw-tomato taste and much of the residual salt. Discard that liquid entirely, as directed, before the spiced vinegar goes in.
- Mustard seedHalf a pound is about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of whole yellow seed. Yellow (white) seed is the traditional choice here; brown seed will make it considerably sharper.
- PeppersGreen and red peppers in a recipe of this period generally meant sweet bell types, the red ones simply being ripe. Substituting hot chiles will change the dish entirely.
- Chop, do not pureeA food processor will reduce this to slush in seconds. Pulse in small batches or hand-chop to a coarse 1/4-inch dice so the relish keeps texture through two boilings.
- Canning method"Boil fifteen minutes and can" is open-kettle canning, filling jars with hot relish and letting the lids seal as they cool. That practice has been abandoned; seals formed this way are unreliable. Follow a current tested green tomato relish procedure for jar preparation and water-bath processing time, or simply refrigerate the finished relish and use it within a few weeks.
- Yield and useThe full quantity should give somewhere in the range of 7 to 9 pints, depending on how much liquid is drained off. Flavor improves with keeping. Good with cold meat, beans, or fried fish.
Piccalilli appears in English cookery books by the mid-eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian mixed pickle; the name is often linked to "paco-lilla" or similar renderings, though its origin is not settled. Early versions leaned on mustard, turmeric and ginger, and mustard and ginger persist here. The American form drifted toward whatever the garden had left, and in the Northeast that often meant green tomatoes, which a September frost would otherwise waste by the bushel. A recipe like this one, contributed under a contributor's name, records what one household did with a peck of unripened fruit: salt it down overnight, boil the rawness out, and spice it heavily enough to carry through a winter.