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Sweet Green Tomato Pickles (Pk green tomatoes sliced large)
1 pk. green tomatoes, sliced 12 large onions, sliced Sprinkle through them 1 C salt Mrs. W. J. Dillon. and let stand over night; drain in the morning.
Then take 2 qts. water and 1 qt. vinegar in which boil the onions and tomatoes for 5 minutes. Drain through a colander, and add 2 qts. vinegar 2 lb. brown sugar ½ lb. ground mustard 1 T cloves 2 T ginger 2 T. cinnamon 4 green peppers, chopped fine Mrs. R. F. Wright.
Boil 15 minutes. This will keep for a year if prepared according to the recipe.
A church-supper pickle built for volume: a peck of tomatoes is a bushel-quarter, and the finished batch fills a shelf. A few of the measures need translating, and one of them looks like a printing error.
- A peck of green tomatoesA peck is two dry gallons, roughly 12-13 lb of tomatoes, or about 25-30 medium fruit. Sliced with 12 onions it will fill an 8-quart preserving pan to the brim, so use the largest heavy-bottomed pot you own.
- The mustard quantity1½ lb of ground mustard looks disproportionate even for a batch this size, and may be a printing error; a quarter-pound is nearer the proportion in comparable large-batch pickles. Treat the printed figure as suspect rather than authoritative.
- The overnight saltingThe cup of salt is a draw, not a seasoning. It pulls water out of the slices so the finished pickle is crisp rather than watery. Drain thoroughly in the morning and press lightly, but do not rinse away all of it or the pickle will taste flat.
- Two vinegars, two jobsThe first vinegar-and-water bath is a blanch to soften the vegetables and carry off raw onion sharpness; it gets thrown away. Only the second 2 quarts of vinegar becomes the pickling liquor, so use a good cider vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity for that stage.
- SpicesThe tablespoon measures suggest cloves, ginger and cinnamon are meant ground rather than whole, though the recipe does not say. The "green peppers" are most likely sweet bell peppers rather than chiles, which would make the pickle sweet-spiced rather than hot.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar varied, and was not necessarily as dark as today's dark brown. Dark brown will work but pushes the finished relish toward molasses and darkens the tomatoes noticeably.
- Storage, and the year-long claimThe recipe says it will keep a year, but gives no sealing or processing step, which is what that claim actually depends on. Follow current boiling-water-canning directions for a sweet pickle relish if you intend to shelf-store it; otherwise treat it as a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a couple of months.
- YieldThis is a large batch; expect well over 8 pints, with the exact figure depending on how much liquid the tomatoes give up. Plan jars accordingly before you start, not after the pot is boiling.
Green tomato pickle was a common American answer to a frost warning: fruit left on the vines in late autumn would never ripen, and boiling it with vinegar, brown sugar and mustard turned a loss into winter relish. Recipes of this shape appear across late nineteenth and early twentieth century community cookbooks under several names, chow-chow and piccalilli among them, and the mustard-heavy versions may owe something to British Indian-influenced pickles of the same period. The double attribution here, Mrs. Dillon beside the first half and Mrs. Wright beside the second, most likely reflects the way contributors' names were set alongside their submissions in books of this kind, though what happened on this particular page cannot be established from the text.