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Pickled Tomatoes
Choose small red or yellow tomatoes, prick them with a pin. Put in glass or stone jars, add a half cup of nasturtium seeds and cover with cold cider vinegar. They will be ready to use in about two weeks, and if kept closely covered will keep all winter.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle with no cooking and no processing, of the kind that used to live in a cold cellar. Two things decide whether it works: the strength of the vinegar and whether the tomatoes stay under it.
- Keep everything submergedPricked tomatoes float, and any fruit sitting above the vinegar will mould or soften within days. Weight them down with a small glass insert, a fermentation weight, or a folded cabbage leaf pressed under the jar's shoulder.
- Vinegar strength mattersThe recipe relies on undiluted cider vinegar for its preservation. Check the label for 5 percent acidity; some artisanal and unfiltered cider vinegars are weaker, and raw vinegars sold with a mother are not a good choice here. Do not add water.
- Store it cold, not in the pantry"Keep all winter" assumed an unheated cellar or larder at cellar temperature. In a modern kitchen this is a refrigerator pickle. Expect one to two months of good quality refrigerated rather than a whole winter on a shelf, and discard any jar that goes cloudy, ropy, gassy or smells yeasty.
- Not a canning recipeThere is no boiling, no headspace and no processing here, so nothing is sterilised and nothing is sealed. If you want shelf-stable jars, use a current tested tomato pickle recipe with measured acid and a water-bath time rather than adapting this one.
- Nasturtium seedsThe green, unripe seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, picked while still soft, long used as a substitute for capers. Half a cup is a generous handful; rinse and drain them, and use only pods from plants you know have not been sprayed. Capers or green peppercorns give a similar peppery note if you have no nasturtiums.
- Choosing the tomatoesSmall, firm, unblemished cherry or grape tomatoes, slightly underripe rather than dead ripe. Split skins let the flesh collapse into mush; the pin pricks are there to let vinegar in without bursting them.
- Jars"Stone" means a glazed stoneware crock. Any clean glass jar with a non-reactive lid works; avoid bare metal lids, which corrode in vinegar and taint the pickle.
- Yield and useRoughly a pound of small tomatoes, with enough vinegar to cover, will fill about a quart jar. Serve them as a sharp relish alongside cold meat, or chopped into a salad.
Uncooked pickles of this sort belong to the older, thriftier end of household preserving: no fuel, no sugar, no spices worth buying, just fruit and whatever vinegar was in the barrel. The nasturtium seeds are the telling detail. Gardeners in Britain and America had been pickling the green pods as a homegrown substitute for imported capers since at least the eighteenth century, and the habit persisted in kitchen-garden cookery long after capers themselves were easy to buy. Small red or yellow tomatoes point to the currant and cherry types then common in home gardens. The book's confidence that the jars will "keep all winter" reflects a household with a cold cellar, and a general reliance on vinegar rather than heat as the preservative.