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Higdon Cold Pickle
Chop four quarts of green tomatoes, six onions and six green peppers, salt well and let them stand overnight in a stone crock. In the morning drain dry and measure. To each four quarts add a tablespoonful of pepper, allspice, and cloves, and a half pound of mustard seed. Put back in the stone crock and cover with cider vinegar. Put on the jar cover and let stand for a month before using.
This is a raw, unheated crock pickle held a month at room temperature, and the acid content is never specified or controlled. The notes below explain the terms and why the method falls outside safe practice today.
- No measured acidityThe vegetables are drained but still wet, and the cider vinegar poured over them is diluted by that moisture to an unknown final strength. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cider vinegar also varied widely in acetic acid content, so there is no way to know the finished pickle sits below the pH 4.6 that keeps low-acid vegetables safe.
- Low-acid vegetables, no heat stepOnions and green peppers are low-acid, and nothing in this recipe is ever cooked, boiled or processed. Salting overnight draws water but does not sterilise, and a month of ambient storage in a covered crock can produce the low-oxygen, uncertain-acid conditions below the surface in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin without any smell or visible spoilage.
- "Put on the jar cover"A stone crock lid is not a seal, and the recipe gives no processing, no headspace, no refrigeration and no storage temperature. Surface yeast and mould growth on an open brine also raises pH over time, which works against the vinegar rather than with it.
- Salt is unquantified"Salt well" is the only guidance for the one preservative step that happens before the vinegar goes in. Curing and pickling recipes that rely on salt need it by weight to do anything reliable.
- If you want to make green tomato relishUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with measured 5 percent vinegar and a boiling-water process. The flavour profile here — green tomato, onion, sweet pepper, mustard seed, allspice and cloves — is the standard chow-chow one and is easy to find in a tested form.
- Terms, for readingA stone crock is a glazed stoneware jar; the recipe does not say what size, though the batch is a large one. "Drain dry and measure" means the four-quart spice ratio is applied to the drained volume, which will be noticeably less than the four quarts you started with. A half pound of mustard seed is roughly a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half of the yellow seed.
Green-tomato pickles belong to the last week of the growing season: frost is coming, the vines are full of fruit that will never ripen, and the whole crop goes into a crock with onions, peppers and spice. Recipes of this shape circulated widely in American community and church cookbooks under a shifting set of names — chow-chow, piccalilli, chopped pickle, mixed pickle. Mustard seed and cloves are shared with British piccalilli, itself usually traced to Anglo-Indian pickles, though the descent of any single recipe of this kind cannot be documented. "Higdon" is one of the more obscure of those names, and no settled explanation for it is known; it is often assumed to be a family or regional name carried into print, but that is conjecture rather than established. Its placement in a supplementary chapter here is at least suggestive: a preserve that demands a month before it is edible sits awkwardly in a volume organised around menus and speed.