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Ripe Tomato Pickle
Puncture the tomato with a thorn or straw. Put a layer of tomatoes, with onions cut up. Sprinkle salt on them, then put another layer of tomatoes and onions, with salt sprinkled over them. When you have filled the jar or vessel with tomatoes, let them remain about a week, then lay them in dishes to drain. Give each tomato a gentle squeeze, to get the salt water out. Put them in a jar and cover with strong vinegar. Boil a small quantity of vinegar with pepper, horseradish, and such other spices as you like, and pour it over the tomatoes. To two gallons of tomatoes, use a box of mustard dissolved in the vinegar.--Mrs. C. C.
This is a dry-salted, cold-packed pickle of the kind that worked reasonably well in a cool Virginia cellar and does not translate to a modern kitchen. The problems are all in what the recipe does not say.
- No measured saltThe cure is a week of tomatoes and onions layered with salt "sprinkled" by eye. Safe salting depends on reaching and holding a known brine concentration; a sprinkle that is adequate for one cook is a spoilage risk for another, and the quantity here is unknowable.
- A week at room temperatureA week before any acid -- The tomatoes sit undisturbed for about seven days before any vinegar touches them. The recipe says nothing about where they are kept; in a warm modern kitchen that week is an uncontrolled ferment of low-acid onion and high-moisture tomato flesh.
- "Strong vinegar" is undefinedNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acidity, and much of it was homemade. Modern safe pickling depends on a known 5 percent acetic acid and a known ratio of vinegar to vegetable. Neither is specified, and the drained tomatoes carry a great deal of their own water into the jar to dilute whatever is poured over them.
- No heat processing at allOnly a small quantity of spiced vinegar is boiled; the tomatoes themselves are never heated and the jars are never processed. An unheated, under-acidified vegetable pack covered in a jar is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which may give no smell, gas or off-taste to warn you.
- Tomatoes are borderline, not safely acidicRipe tomatoes hover near pH 4.6, the line above which botulinum spores can grow, and many older and larger-fruited varieties sit above it. Current tomato canning practice adds measured acid for exactly this reason. Adding chopped onion, which is firmly low-acid, pushes the pack further the wrong way.
- "A box of mustard"The size of a period box of ground mustard is not something we can pin down, so the proportion to two gallons of tomatoes cannot be recovered. Mustard contributes flavour and some antimicrobial effect but is not a preservative you can count on.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe for green or ripe tomato pickle with stated vinegar strength, stated salt weight and a water-bath processing time.
Whole pickled tomatoes belong to the long American habit of putting up the late-summer glut in vinegar, and the puncturing step, done here with a thorn or a straw, was presumably meant to let brine into the fruit without breaking the skin so it survives the jar intact. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first published in the late 1870s), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of such recipes signed only with initials, and "Mrs. C. C." writes as one experienced cook to another: no quantities for the salt, no vinegar strength, no timings beyond "about a week," because she assumes a reader who has watched it done. The vagueness that makes the recipe unusable now is itself the historical evidence: preserving was a judgment skill passed hand to hand, not a set of numbers, until the home-canning bulletins of the twentieth century made it one.