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Chow-Chow Pickle (Peck green tomatoes large)
1/2 peck green tomatoes. 2 large cabbages. 15 onions. 25 cucumbers. 1 plate horseradish. 1/2 1/2 pound mustard-seed. 1 ounce celery-seed. 2 ounces ground pepper. 2 ounces turmeric. 1/2 ounce cinnamon.
Cut the onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbage in small pieces; pack them down overnight in salt, lightly; in the morning pour off the brine, and put them to soak in weak vinegar two days; drain again, and mix the spices. Boil half a gallon vinegar and three pounds sugar, and pour over them hot. Mix two boxes ground seed.--Mrs. R. A.
A late-season mixed pickle scaled for a nineteenth-century pantry: the vegetables alone come to roughly two gallons. Halve or quarter everything unless you have a very large crock and somewhere cool to keep it.
- Half a peck of green tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts, in the neighbourhood of 6 to 7 pounds of tomatoes.
- "1 plate horseradish"This is genuinely unmeasurable at this distance; a table plate heaped with freshly grated root is somewhere near a cup. Start with half that and taste, since bottled prepared horseradish is milder and wetter than grated fresh.
- "Two boxes ground seed"Ambiguous. Mustard was sold in small tins and paper boxes of a few ounces, so this probably means ground mustard added on top of the half pound of whole mustard-seed, but the actual amount cannot be recovered. Add it gradually and judge by heat.
- Weak vinegarThe two-day soak calls for vinegar cut with water, roughly half and half. It is a leaching step, drawing out remaining salt and bitterness from the green tomatoes; the vinegar used is discarded, so use the cheapest you have.
- Vinegar strength and quantityUse commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, which is more consistent than the barrel cider vinegar this recipe assumes. Half a gallon of boiling syrup will not cover this quantity of vegetables; expect to make half again as much, keeping the recipe's proportion of half a gallon of vinegar to three pounds of sugar.
- The salting"Lightly" is the operative word. The vegetables sit overnight only to draw water, not to cure, and the brine is thrown away. Roughly a cup of coarse salt tossed through the whole batch is enough; too much and no amount of soaking will pull it back.
- Turmeric and colourTwo ounces of turmeric, along with the mustard, is what gives chow-chow its yellow. It stains wood, plastic and skin, so work in glass, stainless or glazed stoneware.
- StorageNothing here is sealed or processed, and the original assumed a cold cellar and a stone crock. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle, where it will keep for a couple of months and improve for the first two weeks. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure rather than this text.
- YieldThe full batch is very large and cannot be pinned down from the vague vegetable sizes; measure your crock and jars before you start.
Chow-chow is the standard American answer to the last unripe tomatoes of the season, and it belongs to the world of the nineteenth-century Southern receipt book — Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is full of similar mixed pickles and catsups. The name is generally traced to the pidgin English of the China trade, where chow-chow meant a mixture or medley of odds and ends, and it attached itself in the nineteenth century to any bright mustard-and-turmeric pickle of chopped vegetables. The turmeric, mustard-seed and celery-seed here are close cousins of English piccalilli; what makes this version Southern is the volume, the green tomatoes and the frank three pounds of sugar. Recipes of this scale assumed an autumn day given over to the work and a household to feed through the winter.