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Pickled Tomatoes
2 quarts chopped tomato 2 cups chopped horse-radish 2 cups chopped celery ½ cup salt 1 tablespoon clove 1 cup chopped onion ½ cup chopped peppers 1/21 cup mustard seed ½ cup brown sugar 1 tablespoon cinnamon 4 cups vinegar Mix all ingredients; stir every morning for a week.
Keep in a cool, dark place. 4 cups vinegar 1/4 pound mustard seed + pound horse-radish pound mustard 1 cup brown sugar
This is an uncooked pickle in the chow-chow family: everything is chopped raw, salted, and left to draw and mellow in vinegar. The printed text has been garbled at two points, so read the notes below before shopping.
- The garbled line"1/21 cup mustard seed" is a typesetting error and cannot be resolved with certainty; ½ cup is the most likely reading, consistent with the other half-cup measures. Do not guess upward.
- The trailing listThe lines after the method (4 cups vinegar, mustard seed, horse-radish, mustard, 1 cup brown sugar) are a second, larger set of proportions that has run into the first, apparently a variant using weighed pounds rather than cups. Follow one set or the other, not both.
- Which tomatoesThe text says only "tomato." Firm green or barely turning fruit is the safer choice for this style of pickle: fully ripe tomatoes tend to collapse into a watery pulp under half a cup of salt and will not hold texture through a week of stirring.
- Vinegar strengthUse cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity. Older household vinegar varied, and nothing here is cooked or heat-processed, so the acid is doing all the preserving work along with the salt.
- Fresh horseradishTwo cups of chopped fresh horseradish root is a large amount and very pungent; grate it in a food processor with the lid on or work near an open window. Jarred prepared horseradish is already in vinegar and salt and will throw the balance off.
- Clove and cinnamonA tablespoon each of ground spice is what the text implies. If you use whole cloves and stick cinnamon instead, tie them in cheesecloth so they can be lifted out, or the pickle turns muddy and bitter.
- Stirring and storageStir daily for the week as directed, in a glass, glazed stoneware or stainless vessel, never bare aluminium or iron. After the week, refrigerate it and treat it as a fresh relish to be eaten within a month or two rather than a shelf-stable preserve; it has had no boiling water processing, and "a cool, dark place" in 1907 meant a cellar considerably colder than a modern cupboard.
- YieldServing -- Serve it in small spoonfuls with cold meat, boiled beef or baked beans; the salt and horseradish make it a condiment, not a salad.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and later Hershey, published a general cookbook as advertising for its cocoa. That explains the odd shape of the book: a full domestic manual, chapters on soups and preserving and all, with chocolate appearing more often than commercial logic alone would require. Uncooked pickles of chopped vegetables in salt, vinegar, mustard seed and sugar were known variously as chow-chow, piccalilli or simply "a mixed pickle", the names used loosely and often interchangeably.