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Chow-Chow
One bushel green tomatoes, 2 dozen onions, 2 cups salt. Chop finely and let stand over night. Drain and boil in weak vinegar 2 hours, then drain again. Make a syrup of 8 pounds brown sugar, 2 tablespoons each of cloves, cinnamon and allspice, 1 teaspoon black pepper,½ teaspoon cayenne pepper, 3 quarts vinegar. Let boil, then pour over the tomatoes.
This is a farm-scale relish written for a household that had to deal with every unripened tomato on the vines before the first hard frost. Everything about it — the quantities, the two-hour boil, the vague finish — assumes a big preserving kettle and a cellar.
- A bushel is about 53 lbThat is roughly 24 kg of green tomatoes, far more than a 20-quart kettle will hold. An eighth of the recipe is manageable: about 6 1/2 lb green tomatoes, 3 onions, 1/4 cup pickling salt, 1 lb brown sugar, 1 1/2 cups vinegar for the syrup, and 3/4 teaspoon each of the three sweet spices.
- Use pickling or kosher saltThe overnight salting draws water out of the tomatoes and firms them. Table salt with iodine and anti-caking agents will cloud and darken the brine; weigh or measure a coarse pure salt instead.
- "Weak vinegar"Means vinegar let down with water; the recipe gives no proportion, and half-and-half is a reasonable reading. This liquid is a blanching medium only — it is drained away and discarded, so it does not contribute to the keeping acidity of the finished relish. The 3 quarts of full-strength vinegar in the syrup does that work.
- Two hours is a long boilModern green tomatoes soften in 30 to 45 minutes; boiled the full two hours they collapse into pulp. Cook until the pieces are translucent and just tender, then drain.
- Whole spices give a cleaner resultIf the two tablespoons each of cloves, cinnamon and allspice are taken as ground, they will make the syrup muddy and gritty. Tying whole cloves, broken cinnamon and allspice berries in a spice bag and simmering them in the vinegar gives a clear syrup, though the flavour will be milder.
- The recipe does not finish itselfPouring hot syrup over drained vegetables and sealing — the old open-kettle method — is no longer considered sound. Return everything to the kettle, bring the whole thing to a full boil together, then either refrigerate it and eat it within a few weeks or process filled jars according to a current tested boiling-water-bath recipe for green tomato relish.
- SweetnessEight pounds of brown sugar to a bushel works out to a genuinely sweet pickle, closer to a chutney than a sour relish.
Chow-chow is the standard North American name for a chopped, spiced, vinegar-preserved vegetable relish, and the word is generally traced to the pidgin-English "chow-chow" used in the China trade for a mixed preserve of ginger and fruit in syrup — a name that attached itself to European-style mixed pickles by the mid-nineteenth century. The green tomato version belongs particularly to Atlantic Canada and to Pennsylvania Dutch kitchens, both places where a short growing season left whole vines of fruit that would never ripen. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, published by a Canadian flour miller and assembled largely from recipes sent in by housewives across the country, is a fair indication of how routine the dish was: a bushel-scale recipe printed without a word of explanation, because everyone reading it already knew what chow-chow was for and how much of it a family got through over a winter of salt pork and boiled potatoes.