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Indian Relish
Chop fine a peck of ripe tomatoes, drain them, and add 3 C chopped celery, 2 C chopped onions, and ½ C salt. Let mixture stand 2 hours, then add 2 pts. vinegar 3 C brown sugar ½ C white mustard seed. 2 red peppers, chopped fine 1 t ground cinnamon 1 t allspice 1/2 T cloves Mix the ingredients well and seal in jars without cooking.
This is a raw-packed, unprocessed preserve, and that single instruction — "seal in jars without cooking" — is what puts it outside modern practice. The notes below explain the recipe's terms and then why it should not be put up as written.
- The hinge: sealed raw, never processedNothing here is heated, and the jars are sealed cold. Filled jars of low-acid vegetables held at room temperature under a seal are exactly the anaerobic condition Clostridium botulinum requires; the spores are common on tomatoes, celery and onions pulled from soil. Salt and vinegar alone, at these proportions, are not a substitute for a measured acidity and a boiling-water process.
- Not enough acid for the volumeTwo pints of vinegar are spread across a peck of tomatoes (drained) plus roughly five to six cups of other vegetables — well over a gallon of solids. Ripe tomatoes are borderline in acidity to begin with, and some tomato varieties fall on the low-acid side. There is no way to know the finished pH, and the recipe offers no way to control it.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthThe original does not say what kind of vinegar, or at what strength; it assumes whatever the household had. Tested preserving recipes specify 5 percent acetic acid for a reason; "2 pts. vinegar" carries no such guarantee.
- What a peck isA peck is eight dry quarts, about 12 to 14 pounds of tomatoes — a large canner's batch, not a small jar or two. Worth knowing simply to read the recipe's scale correctly.
- The abbreviationsC is a cup, pt. a pint, t a teaspoon, T a tablespoon. White mustard seed is the pale yellow seed sold today as yellow mustard seed, milder than brown.
- Half a cup of salt is a cure, not a seasoningThe salt-and-stand step -- The half cup of salt and the two-hour stand are there to draw water out of the tomatoes before the vinegar goes in, which concentrates the mixture. It also explains why the finished relish would have been saltier than current taste expects. It is not, on its own, enough salt to preserve the jar.
- If you want this relishUse a current tested recipe for tomato relish or chow-chow from a reliable preserving source, one that gives a processing time and a defined vinegar strength.
"Indian relish" is one of a family of American condiments that borrowed the name, and a little of the flavour, of Anglo-Indian chutney — sweet, sour, spiced with cinnamon, cloves and allspice, and stiffened with mustard seed and chilli. Imported chutneys were an expensive grocery item, and home versions were built from what the garden gave up at the end of the season: green or ripe tomatoes, onions, celery, cabbage. The result has more in common with piccalilli and chow-chow than with anything made in India. An uncooked relish also saved fuel and a long afternoon over the range at exactly the time of year when the kitchen was already busy with the main canning.