Louise Glaum
Celebrity
Slice a gallon of unpeeled green tomatoes and six large onions; mix them together. Stir into these a quart of vinegar, one cupful of brown sugar, a tablespoonful each of salt, pepper, and mustard seed, a half tablespoon each of ground allspice and cloves.
Stew all until the tomatoes are very tender, then put into glass jars and seal.
Sincerely,
Two things need saying before anything else: the first clause of this entry is not part of the pickle, and the sealing method at the end is the reason this cannot be followed today.
- The stray opening line"Put butter into kettle; when melted add molasses" -- is a fragment of another recipe that has run into Miss Glaum's contribution; how it got there (typesetting, or later transcription of the page) is not something the text tells us. There is no butter or molasses in a green tomato pickle.
- Open-kettle sealingThe instruction to stew, jar and seal with no boiling-water process is what canning authorities call the open-kettle method. It was abandoned because the headspace and jar rim are never sterilised and the seal is formed by cooling steam alone; seals fail silently and the contents spoil in storage.
- Acidity is not controlledA quart of vinegar to a gallon of tomatoes plus six large onions is a low ratio for a shelf-stable pickle, and no vinegar strength is specified. Household vinegar of the period varied widely in acidity; without a known strength the finished pH is unknown, and a sealed jar of a low-acid onion-and-tomato mixture that may not be acid enough is the situation in which Clostridium botulinum can grow.
- No process time or temperature"Stew all until the tomatoes are very tender" is a texture cue, not a heat process. Nothing in the recipe establishes that the jar contents reach or hold a temperature that matters for preservation. Use a current tested green tomato pickle recipe if you want to put this up.
- Archaic measures, for reading the recipeA gallon of sliced unpeeled green tomatoes is roughly 5 to 6 lb of fruit; a quart of vinegar is 4 cups. The "tablespoonful" of the period was close to the modern one, but "a tablespoonful each of salt, pepper" is a great deal of black pepper by current taste.
- YieldThe original gives none. A batch this size comes out at somewhere between 6 and 8 pints depending on how far the tomatoes are cooked down.
Green tomato pickle is a thrift dish: it exists because frost, or the end of the season, leaves a gardener with fruit that will never ripen. Recipes for it run through American community and charity cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, usually under names like green tomato pickle, chow-chow or piccalilli, and nearly always with the same frame of sliced tomatoes, onions, vinegar, brown sugar and a warm spice mix of mustard seed, allspice and cloves. This book belongs to a specific genre of the 1910s and 1920s, the celebrity contributor cookbook, in which stage and screen performers were solicited for a favourite dish and a signature; Louise Glaum was a silent-film actress known for vamp roles at Triangle and Ince, and the domestic modesty of a jar of tomato pickle is very much the point of such a collection. The truncated "Sincerely," at the end is where her facsimile signature sat on the original page.