Home › Vegetables › Green Tomato Pickles
Green Tomato Pickles
1 peck of green tomatoes, 1 ounce of whole allspice, 1 dozen onions, I 11/½ ounces of black pepper, ¼ pound of ground mustard, 1 ounce of whole cloves, 1 ounce of mustard-seed.
Slice the tomatoes and onions. Then put a layer of tomatoes in the bottom of a jar, then a layer of onions, then a sprinkling of salt, then tomatoes and so on till ali are used. Stand aside over night. Next morning drain off all the liquor. Put them in a porcelain kettle, add the spices, cover with vinegar and simmer gently fifteen minutes. Put away in stone or glass jars.
This is a nineteenth-century open-kettle pickle, and the text as printed has both transcription damage and gaps that matter for safety. The notes below explain what the quantities mean and why the method should not be followed.
- No processing, unknown acidityThe tomatoes and onions are simmered in vinegar and then simply "put away" in jars, with no boiling-water processing and no sealing step described. Vinegar strength in the period was inconsistent and is not specified here, and onions are a low-acid vegetable; a jar filled this way and stored at room temperature is not a safely preserved product by any current standard. Use a tested modern green tomato pickle recipe if you want something shelf-stable.
- The salt is unmeasuredSalt is called for only as "a sprinkling" between layers, and most of it is poured off with the drained liquor the next morning. Overnight salting draws water out of the tomatoes, but the amount left in the finished pickle is unknowable, so the recipe gives no reliable preservative floor.
- "4 pound of ground mustard"Almost certainly a misprint for a quarter-pound. Four pounds of dry mustard against a peck of tomatoes would be inedible; a quarter-pound, roughly a cup, is a plausible quantity, though the intended figure cannot be recovered with certainty from the page.
- "1 1/½ ounces of black pepper"Damaged type. The intended figure is very likely one and a half ounces, matching the ounce measures used for the other spices, but it cannot be read with certainty from the page.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts, which for sliced green tomatoes runs somewhere around 12 to 13 pounds. Together with a dozen onions this is a large batch by modern standards.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamelled cast-iron or stainless pan. The point is that bare iron, copper and aluminium react with vinegar, discolouring the pickle and picking up a metallic taste. That part of the instruction still holds.
- Whole spicesThe recipe adds the whole allspice, cloves and mustard seed to the kettle and gives no instruction to strain them out, so they would have stayed in the jars. If you are following a current recipe, a muslin spice bag makes them easier to control.
Green tomato pickle is a frost recipe. Tomatoes ripen unevenly and a first hard frost ends the crop, so kitchen gardeners were left every autumn with pounds of hard green fruit that would never colour, and many American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century carry at least one way of pickling it. The seasoning here — mustard both ground and seed, allspice, cloves, black pepper, onions, vinegar — belongs to the mustard-pickle family that also underlies chow-chow and piccalilli, dishes generally traced to Anglo-Indian and English pickling traditions and thoroughly naturalised in the United States by the time this book appeared. Its presence in a vegetable cookery book reflects a period when preserving was simply part of vegetable cookery rather than a separate specialism, and when a household expected to put up its own relishes rather than buy them by the jar.