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Green Tomato Sweet Pickles
Take half a bushel of tomatoes, slice them, and sprinkle salt between the layers, and let them stand all night. Drain them. To 1 gallon of vinegar add 5 pounds of brown sugar, 1 cupful of stick cinnamon, 1 cupful of white mustard-seed, half a cupful of black pepper, half a cupful of cloves. Boil the tomatoes in the vinegar and spices a few minutes, or until tender.
A full-scale farm recipe written for a household putting up the last of the tomato vines before frost. Scaled down to a quarter it becomes a manageable afternoon.
- Half a bushelA bushel of tomatoes runs about 50 lb, so half a bushel is roughly 25 lb. A quarter batch (about 6 lb tomatoes, 1 quart vinegar, 1 1/4 lb brown sugar, and a quarter of each spice) fits a normal stockpot.
- The salt is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity for the overnight salting, and there is no way to recover it. The point is to draw water out, and the slices are drained rather than rinsed; salt to taste with a scattering between the layers.
- Green, not ripeThese are hard, fully green tomatoes, firm enough to hold their shape after salting and boiling. Ripe or even half-ripe fruit collapses into a spiced sauce.
- Whole spices, by volumeA cupful of broken cinnamon sticks weighs only an ounce or two; the pepper and cloves are whole, not ground. Tie them in a spice bag or double cheesecloth unless you want cloves and peppercorns in every jar.
- The spicing is assertiveHalf a cup each of whole cloves and black pepper across a gallon of vinegar is a strong hand by current taste. Halve both on a first attempt and adjust; the cinnamon and mustard seed can stay as written.
- Boil briefly"A few minutes, or until tender" means exactly that. Green tomato slices go soft and then to mush quickly in hot syrup; pull them while there is still resistance at the centre, since they continue to soften in the jar.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied. Use a commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity so the finished pickle is reliably acidic.
- Storing itThe recipe stops at the boiling and says nothing about jars, sealing or processing. Refrigerate the cooled pickle and eat it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for sweet pickles if you want shelf-stable jars.
Green tomato pickle was the standard answer to a problem every kitchen garden had: a vine full of fruit that would never ripen before the first frost. Sliced green tomatoes take salt and syrup well and stay firm, which made them a favourite base for the sweet-and-spiced pickles found in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century, alongside sweet cucumber and watermelon rind. The formula here is typical of the type -- brown sugar for colour and depth, vinegar for keeping, and whole cinnamon, cloves, mustard seed and pepper for the warm, almost dessert-like spicing that distinguished a "sweet pickle" from a sour one. Recipes of this kind were often printed in bushel quantities, the scale of a household preserving in volume for the winter.