Home › Pickles › Whole Ripe Tomato Pickles
Whole Ripe Tomato Pickles
Take the desired quantity of rather small firm ripe tomatoes, set them in boiling water for a few minutes, lift out and peel carefully, put on platter and salt well, let stand until the salt has permeated the tomatoes. Then arrange them in a small earthen jar, a layer of tomatoes and a layer of onions sliced very thin, cover with a tablespoonful of ground mustard and the same amount of black pepper, and so on, until the tomatoes are all used.
Then pour enough cold cider vinegar over them to cover. Let stand at least two weeks.
This is a cold-pack, unsealed, unmeasured pickle, and it sits at room temperature for a fortnight. That combination is why it cannot be recommended today, and the notes below explain the specific failure points rather than how to work around them.
- Tomatoes are not a high-acid vegetableRipe tomatoes generally test somewhere around pH 4.2 to 4.9, and some varieties can sit above 4.6. Peeled whole fruit dilutes the surrounding vinegar with its own juice as it stands, so the finished liquid may never reach the pH 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. The recipe gives no measured vinegar-to-tomato ratio and no acidity figure, so there is no way to know where a given batch lands.
- No measured salt"Salt well" and "until the salt has permeated" is not a brine strength. Salting on a platter draws out juice but leaves the concentration inside the fruit unknown, so salt is doing nothing dependable as a preservative here.
- An open earthen jar at room temperatureAn earthen jar at room temperature -- Nothing is heat-processed and no seal is specified; the recipe says nothing about how, or whether, the crock is covered. Two weeks at room temperature invites surface yeasts and molds, and mold growth raises the pH of the liquid beneath it, which is precisely the direction that favors anaerobic spoilage lower down.
- Raw onion in an anaerobic packOnions are a soil crop and can carry botulinum spores; buried under liquid in a low-acid pack they sit in exactly the conditions those spores need. The spices add no antimicrobial effect worth counting on.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthCider vinegar of the period was frequently home-made and variable; even today, unlabeled or "raw" ciders are not guaranteed to be 5 percent acetic acid. Modern pickle formulas specify the percentage for exactly this reason.
- If you want tomato picklesUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service, which will give you a measured vinegar ratio, a processing time and a jar seal. Do not adapt this text.
Whole-fruit vinegar pickles like this belong to the long American tradition of putting up the tail end of the tomato crop in a crock rather than a canning jar — the method predates reliable home canning and would presumably have depended on a cool cellar, a watchful cook, and a batch eaten within weeks rather than kept for a year. Green tomato pickles are the more common form in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books, since unripe fruit holds its shape and carries more acid; a ripe-tomato version like this one is the harder trick, and the instructions accordingly insist on "rather small firm" specimens and careful peeling. The dry spicing — ground mustard and black pepper layered in rather than boiled into a syrup — marks it as a cold pickle, a method that is simple and low in labor, and also the least controlled.