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Sweet Tomato Pickle
Peel small tomatoes with a sharp knife; scald in strong ginger tea until clear. To four pounds tomatoes, two pounds sugar, not quite one quart vinegar; cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, to taste.
Scald the tomatoes and pour on boiling hot.--Mrs. J. H. F. Sweet Tomato Pickle.
Boil green tomatoes in strong ginger tea for ten minutes. Then take out, and to every two pounds add one quart of vinegar, one pound sugar, cinnamon, cloves and mace to your taste.--Mrs. P.
Sweet Tomato Pickle.
Slice one gallon green tomatoes, and put a handful salt to each layer of tomatoes. Let them stand twelve hours, then drain off the liquor, and add to them two green peppers, and from two to four onions, sliced; take two quarts vinegar, half a pint molasses, two tablespoonfuls mustard, one teaspoonful all-spice, and one of cloves; heat it until it begins to boil, then put in tomatoes, onions, and peppers; let them boil ten minutes: pour into a stone jar, and seal tight. In a fortnight they will be ready for use.--Mrs. Dr. P. C.
Three separate contributions printed under one heading: two sweet spiced whole-tomato pickles and one chopped green-tomato relish. Read them as alternatives, not as stages of a single recipe.
- Ginger teaNot a beverage but a strong decoction of bruised ginger root simmered in water and strained. The book gives no proportions or timing. It flavours the fruit, and is generally held to help the flesh stay firm.
- "Until clear"In the first version this is the doneness cue for the peeled tomatoes: the flesh turns translucent. The recipe gives no time; past that point they collapse.
- Green tomatoesThe second and third recipes want fully unripe, hard green fruit, not the underripe pink ones sold as "heirloom green". Firmness is the whole point; ripe tomatoes go to mush in ten minutes of boiling.
- "Pour on boiling hot"The line is compressed and ambiguous; the usual reading is that the scalded tomatoes go into the jar and the boiling sugar-vinegar-spice syrup is poured over them. The recipe does not direct that the tomatoes be boiled in the syrup, and doing so would break them up.
- Whole spicesCinnamon, mace, cloves and nutmeg here would ordinarily mean whole or broken pieces rather than ground; the recipe does not say how they are added. Mace is the dried aril, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, more floral and less sweet.
- The salting stepIn the third recipe the twelve-hour salting is what keeps the sliced tomatoes crisp and stops the finished pickle from turning watery. Do not shorten it, and drain thoroughly rather than rinsing.
- Stone jar, sealed tightA glazed crock covered and sealed, often with cloth and wax, was one common nineteenth-century method. High-acid vinegar pickles keep well, but modern practice is either to refrigerate the jars or to process filled, hot jars in a boiling-water bath per current canning guidance; a "tight seal" on a cooling crock is not a vacuum seal.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled, in the words of its own title page, from the contributions of some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states, which is why the same dish appears three times over three sets of initials rather than being edited into a single authoritative version. Sweet spiced pickles of this kind, fruit scalded and steeped in a sugar-and-vinegar syrup with whole warm spices, belong to a long Anglo-American line that also produced sweet pickled peaches, pears and watermelon rind; the tomato joined it late, and it is often said, though the evidence is thinner than the story suggests, that the fruit was treated with suspicion in much of the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Green tomatoes in particular gave a use for the fruit that would not ripen before frost, and the ginger infusion here is a firming and flavouring trick that resembles what was done in the same era's ginger-preserved pears and melon.