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Tomato Relish (Not Cooked)
One peck ripe tomatoes chopped finely and drain over night, 2 cups chopped celery, 4 large onions, 2 peppers cut finely, 3 cups sugar, 2 ounces white mustard seed, 1 quart good vinegar. Put in sealers without cooking.
This is a raw-packed, unheated preserve, and that is the whole problem with it. The notes below explain the archaic language and then why the method cannot be followed.
- No heat, no process, sealed jars"Sealers" are glass preserving jars with clamp or screw lids. Filling them with an uncooked vegetable mixture and sealing gives Clostridium botulinum exactly what it wants: an oxygen-free jar held at room temperature. Nothing in this recipe kills the spores and nothing reliably stops them germinating.
- The acid is too dilute to protect itOne quart of vinegar is spread through roughly 12 to 13 pounds of tomatoes plus onions, celery and peppers, all of which are low-acid and all of which carry their own water. There is no way to know the finished pH, and a shelf-stable uncooked pack needs to be reliably below 4.6.
- Modern tomatoes are less acidicTested modern tomato recipes specify added bottled lemon juice or citric acid by measure, because tomato acidity is variable and some fruit sits close to the pH 4.6 threshold. This recipe includes no such measured margin. (The often-repeated claim that older cultivars were reliably sharper than modern ones is tradition rather than established fact.)
- No salt at allMany published relishes of this kind called for pickling salt, both for drawing water from the vegetables and for its preservative effect. This version calls for none, so it lacks even the modest protection a heavy salt load would have given.
- Draining overnight at room temperatureDraining overnight -- The recipe sets no temperature for the overnight drain. Chopped tomatoes left standing at modern room temperature are a growth medium before the vinegar ever reaches them.
- A peck, for referenceA dry peck is a quarter bushel, about 12 to 13 pounds of tomatoes. That is the scale the recipe is working at, which is worth knowing simply to understand how little vinegar is doing the work.
- If you want tomato relishUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, whether for a cooked and water-bath-processed relish or a refrigerator relish meant to be eaten within days.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as an advertising premium for its Five Roses flour, and like most such books it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why the instructions are so telegraphic and why the standards vary from page to page. Uncooked relishes and "cold chow" mixtures were common in that tradition: presumably a household with a genuinely cold cellar, a heavy hand with salt and a habit of eating a jar within weeks stood a better chance with them. What changed is not the appetite for sweet-sour tomato relish but the understanding of botulism, which was only beginning to be studied in North America in this period; the safe-canning rules that make this recipe unusable were worked out and publicized largely in the decades after it was printed.