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Sweet Green Tomato Pickles (Pk small green tomatoes large)
1 pk. small green tomatoes 6 large onions, sliced (whole) Sprinkle over with 1 C salt. Allow to stand over night. In morning drain. Take 2 qts. water, 1 qt. vinegar. Boil tomatoes and onions in this 5 minutes, then drain through colander. Take 2 qts. vinegar, 3 lbs. brown sugar, bag of spices, 1 T cloves and cinnamon, and 6 red peppers chopped fine. Boil all together until tomatoes are tender. Mrs. Arthur Greenwood. 7 lbs. fruit 3½ lbs. sugar 1 pt. vinegar
A two-day sweet pickle of the type nearly every church cookbook carried: salt overnight, blanch, then simmer in spiced sugar-vinegar syrup. The quantities are large by modern standards and a few of the measures need translating.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, which works out to roughly 12 lb of small green tomatoes (a bushel of tomatoes is reckoned at about 53 lb). Scaling to a quarter or half batch is sensible unless you want a winter's worth.
- "Small green tomatoes (whole)""(whole)" -- The parenthetical follows "sliced," and it is unclear whether it was meant for the onions or the tomatoes. If the tomatoes are to go in whole, use ones small enough for that, walnut-size or under; larger green tomatoes would need slicing, and will cook faster than whole ones.
- The salt1 cup of salt over 10-12 lb of tomatoes is a draw, not a preservation cure. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt clouds the brine and can darken the fruit. Drain well in the morning and do not rinse away more than the loose surface salt or the finished pickle will taste flat.
- Bag of spices"1 T cloves and cinnamon" may mean a tablespoon of each or a tablespoon of the two together; either way they go into a cheesecloth bag so they can be lifted out. Loose cloves will turn the syrup muddy brown and keep infusing in the jar.
- Six red peppersProbably small dried red pods of the cayenne type rather than sweet peppers, given that they are chopped fine and used six at a time. Six makes a distinctly hot pickle; two or three, or a teaspoon of crushed red pepper, gives a background warmth. Fresh red bell peppers are unlikely to be the intent.
- "Until tomatoes are tender"The hinge of the recipe. Whole small tomatoes take 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer after the 5-minute blanch; test with a skewer, which should slide in with no resistance. Rolling boil will burst the skins and thicken the syrup to jam before the centers soften.
- Sealing and storageThe recipe stops at the kettle and assumes hot syrup poured into hot jars with no further processing. For anything meant to sit on a shelf, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for pickles; otherwise treat this as a refrigerator pickle and use it within a couple of months.
- YieldA full peck makes a large batch, several quarts of finished pickle. Flavor improves after two to three weeks in the syrup.
- The trailing line"7 lbs. fruit, 3½ lbs. sugar, 1 pt. vinegar" is a stray fragment, a proportion line for some other sweet pickle or conserve. It is not part of the green tomato instructions.
Sweet green tomato pickle is a thrift dish: it exists because a frost, or the end of a season, leaves a gardener with fruit that will never ripen. Recipes for it spread widely through American community cookbooks, usually under names like green tomato pickle, sweet chow or sliced tomato pickle, and the method here a long salt draw, a blanch in weak vinegar to set the flesh, then a boil in heavily spiced sugar syrup is the standard one, varying mostly in the spice bag and the heat. Cloves, cinnamon and brown sugar mark it as a "sweet" pickle in the nineteenth-century sense. That it appears here credited to Mrs. Arthur Greenwood is typical of community cookbooks, which were compiled from members' own working notes; the abbreviations, the missing sealing step and the fragment of another recipe tacked on at the end suggest a book set from handwritten cards rather than edited into uniformity.