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Green Tomato Pickle (Slice and chop green tomatoes)
Slice and chop green tomatoes, until you have one gallon Chop one dozen large onions. Mix and sprinkle four large spoonfuls of salt upon them, let it stand one night; next day drain off all the water, and have one quart strong vinegar, two pounds sugar, spices and pepper to your taste. Put in the vinegar, and put with the tomatoes in a porcelain kettle; boil half an hour. Place in the jar for keeping and cover closely. Three or four days afterwards, boil again for a few minutes and put away for use.--Mrs. L. P. Green Tomato Pickle.
One peck tomatoes sliced. One dozen onions. Sprinkle with salt, and lay by twenty-four hours; then drain them. 3 pounds sugar to one gallon vinegar. 1 1/2 ounces ground pepper. 1 ounce whole cloves. 1 ounce mustard-seed. 1 ounce allspice. 1 cup mustard, mixed. Put all in a kettle, with vinegar enough to cover; boil till tender.--Mrs. S. B.
Two versions of the same pickle from two contributors, one measured by the gallon of chopped fruit, the other by the peck. Both rely on an overnight salting to draw water out of the tomatoes, and that step is the one that determines whether the finished pickle is crisp or slack.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is eight dry quarts, which works out to roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. Mrs. L. P.'s gallon of chopped fruit is about 6 lb, so her recipe makes half the batch.
- "Four large spoonfuls of salt"Read this as tablespoons, not the modern serving spoon; it is a salting brine, not a preservative, and the water it pulls out is thrown away. Use plain pickling or kosher salt, since iodized salt can cloud the syrup.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamel-lined iron pot. Any nonreactive pan works, but keep vinegar out of bare aluminum, copper or cast iron, which will discolour the pickle and pick up a metallic taste.
- "Strong vinegar"Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in strength. Use a standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar and do not dilute it; the acid is what keeps the pickle.
- "One cup mustard, mixed"This most likely means prepared mustard paste rather than dry powder: mustard flour worked to a paste with a little of the vinegar. It thickens the syrup and brings the second recipe closer to a chow-chow.
- Whole spicesAn ounce each of cloves and allspice left loose will darken the pickle and turn up whole in the jar. Tie them in a spice bag or a doubled square of cheesecloth and lift it out before packing.
- The two boilingsMrs. L. P.'s return to the kettle three or four days later was a keeping trick from an era without refrigeration; the reheating knocked back anything that had started to grow. It is not a substitute for proper processing.
- StorageNeither recipe processes the sealed jars, and "cover closely" probably meant a cloth-and-wax seal or a screw-top Mason-type jar. Keep the finished pickle refrigerated and eat it within a couple of months, or follow a current tested procedure for water-bath processing pickles if you want it shelf-stable.
Green tomato pickle exists because tomatoes do not all ripen. In a Virginia kitchen garden the first frost arrived with the vines still loaded, and the hard green fruit was too sour and firm to eat but ideal for the salt-and-vinegar treatment that Southern households applied to almost every surplus vegetable — the same logic behind chow-chow, piccalilli and cucumber mangoes. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialed housekeepers, which is why the book so often prints two or three versions of one dish back to back, as here. The pair is instructive: Mrs. L. P. works by weight of sugar to a quart of vinegar and leaves the spicing to taste, while Mrs. S. B. specifies her ounces of pepper, cloves, mustard-seed and allspice. The addition of a cup of mixed mustard in the second recipe marks it as the more elaborate relish, closer to what would later be sold in jars under the name chow-chow.