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Green Tomato Soy
; 2 gal. tomatoes, sliced 12 onions, sliced : 2 qts. vinegar 1 qt. sugar 2 T salt 1 In a small sack put 2 T mustard, 2 T pepper, 2 T allspice, 2 T cinnamon. Mix all together and cook until tender. Seal. 3 qts. water 1 qt. vinegar
This is a recognizable end-of-season green tomato relish, but as transcribed it cannot be canned safely and the ingredient list has been garbled in the original printing.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal." means pouring the hot relish into jars and screwing on lids with no processing at all. That method was standard in church cookbooks of this era and is no longer considered safe: it gives no reliable vacuum and no measured heat to the jar contents. Current tested instructions from a state extension service or the USDA should be used for any tomato relish you intend to keep.
- Unknown final aciditySafe canning of a tomato pickle depends on the finished product staying at or below roughly pH 4.6, and that can only be guaranteed by a measured vinegar-to-vegetable ratio at a known acid strength. Two gallons of sliced tomatoes and twelve onions is a variable mass, and household vinegar of the period was of uncertain and inconsistent strength.
- The stray water and vinegarThe trailing "3 qts. water 1 qt. vinegar" appears after "Seal." and belongs either to a preliminary soaking brine or to the next recipe on the page. There is no way to tell from the text whether that liquid was meant to go into the pot, which makes the acid balance unknowable rather than merely approximate.
- No cooking time or temperature"Cook until tender" gives no time, no target, and no indication of how thick the finished soy should be. With a batch this size, that is a judgment the original cook made by eye and by long familiarity with the dish.
- Green tomatoes are not the safe end of the rangeGreen tomatoes are not a safety margin -- Unripe tomatoes are generally somewhat more acidic than ripe ones, but tomato pH varies with variety and ripeness and ripe fruit can sit above 4.6. Either way, the fruit's own acidity is not a substitute for a measured quantity of vinegar.
- ScaleTwo gallons of sliced tomatoes plus twelve onions is a canning-day batch of perhaps eight to ten pints, meant for a cellar shelf and a winter of use, not for a small kitchen.
- The spice bagThe mustard, pepper, allspice and cinnamon go into a cloth sack so the relish is not left gritty and speckled with whole spice. "T" here is a tablespoon. The recipe does not say what becomes of the bag, though such bags are normally lifted out before the jars are filled.
"Soy" in American cookbooks of this kind often does not mean soy sauce: it was used for a dark, thick, sweet-sour spiced condiment served with meat, and the name is usually taken to be borrowed from the imported bottled sauce it stood in for, though that derivation is tradition rather than documented fact. Green tomato soy is a thrift recipe: it uses fruit that would not ripen before frost, carried through the winter on sugar, vinegar and a bag of whole spices. Recipes for it appear widely in community and church cookbook collections, though nothing in this text establishes the book's region or date, and no contributor is named here.