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To Make Green Tomato Sauce
16 pounds tomatoes. 7 pints good cider vinegar. 4 pounds brown sugar. 1/2 1/2 pint celery-seed. 1/2 pint mustard-seed. 1 1/2 pints onions, cut fine. 1 teacup ground mustard. 1/2 ounce mace. 2 ounces cinnamon. 1 ounce allspice. 1/2 ounce cloves. 1/2 pound black pepper.
Put all of the spices in the vinegar, and boil one hour. Then put in the tomatoes, which you must slice the night before, and put one layer of salt and one of tomatoes. Drain the water off, and boil the tomatoes in the spiced vinegar till done.--Mrs. Dr. S.
This is a spiced green-tomato pickle in the Virginia manner, built on a vinegar-and-sugar base and made in a quantity meant to fill a crock. Everything hinges on the overnight salting: it draws out the water that would otherwise thin the vinegar and leave the sauce slack.
- Scale it down firstSixteen pounds of tomatoes with seven pints of vinegar yields roughly two gallons of finished sauce. Quartering the recipe gives about two quarts and is far easier to manage in a domestic pot.
- Old volume measuresA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned somewhere between 3/4 cup and a full cup. A half pint of celery seed is a full cup by volume, close to 4 oz by weight; a cup of mustard seed is denser, nearer 6 oz. These are large quantities, but they are for a batch of this size.
- Half a pound of black pepperQuantities on this scale do turn up in period receipts, so it may well be as written, but it is aggressive by modern palates. Even scaled proportionally, start with a third of it, taste the spiced vinegar after the hour of boiling, and add more.
- Bag the ground spicesBag the spices -- The recipe does not say whether the mace, cinnamon, allspice and cloves are whole or ground. If ground, boiling them loose for an hour will leave the sauce gritty and muddy brown. Tie them in cheesecloth and lift them out, or use whole spices; keep the ground mustard loose, since it thickens the liquid.
- The salting stepSlice the tomatoes about 1/4 inch, layer them with salt in a non-reactive bowl overnight, then drain thoroughly and discard the brine. Do not rinse unless you have been very generous with the salt.
- "Till done"That means the tomato slices are translucent and tender and the syrup has thickened enough to coat a spoon, usually 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer. Boiling hard will reduce the slices to pulp.
- StorageThe text gives no storage instruction; a stoneware crock in a cold cellar would have been the period expectation. Pack it hot into clean jars, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for months; if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested processing schedule for tomato relish rather than this text, which gives none.
- ServingIt is a condiment, not a cooking sauce or: a spoonful alongside cold ham, roast pork, beef or beans, in the same role as chow-chow.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives and signed here only as "Mrs. Dr. S.", in the book's usual half-anonymous style, belongs to the era when the end of the tomato season was a problem to be solved. Frost arrives with the vines still carrying fruit that will never ripen, and green tomatoes, firm, tart and low in sugar, take to vinegar and spice better than ripe ones do. Recipes of this shape appear across nineteenth-century American cookbooks under names like green tomato pickle, tomato soy, and chow-chow, and the heavy hand with cinnamon, mace, allspice and cloves reflects a period when imported spices were the ordinary signature of a good preserve rather than a special occasion. The enormous yield is the other mark of the period: a household put up sauce by the crockful in October and drew on it until spring.