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Sweet Tomato Pickle
4 quarts green tomatoes 4 sliced onions ½ cup salt 1 tablespoon each of clove, mustard, and cinnamon 4 cups water 2 pounds brown sugar 2 cups vinegar 1/4 teaspoon cayenne Slice tomatoes, add onions and salt, and let stand twelve hours. Drain, add water and two cups vinegar, and boil one half hour. Drain, to tomatoes add remaining ingredients, and cook one half hour. Keep in stone jar in cool, dry place.
A straightforward end-of-season green tomato pickle: salt overnight, blanch in vinegar water, then cook down in a sweet spiced syrup. A few of the quantities need interpreting before you start.
- Four quarts of green tomatoesMeasured sliced, this is roughly 5 to 6 lb of fruit. Use hard, fully green tomatoes; any that have begun to blush are softer and more likely to break up during the second cooking.
- The vinegar reads shortTwo cups of vinegar are used in the first boil, which leaves nothing for the syrup even though the method calls for it. Plan on a second 2 cups of 5 percent cider vinegar for the final half hour, and taste the syrup before it finishes reducing.
- Cayenne quantityThe amount of cayenne is not legible as a whole number. Start at a quarter teaspoon for this volume and adjust; the sugar mutes heat considerably.
- Ground spices, not wholeA tablespoon each of clove, mustard, and cinnamon most likely means ground spice, though period pickle recipes sometimes used whole spice tied in a bag. A tablespoon of ground clove is assertive by modern palates; two teaspoons is closer to current taste, and the mustard is better as ground yellow mustard than as prepared.
- Brown sugar by weightTwo pounds is about 4½ cups packed. Light brown gives a clearer syrup, dark brown a molasses depth that suits the clove.
- The salting stageHalf a cup of salt on the sliced tomatoes and onions for twelve hours draws out a great deal of water. Drain thoroughly and, if you are using fine table salt rather than coarse, rinse briefly or the finished pickle will be aggressively salty.
- Watch the second cookingHalf an hour in the sugar and vinegar is enough to turn the slices translucent. Past that the tomatoes break down and the pickle becomes a chutney, which is not what the recipe intends.
- StorageA stone jar in a cool, dry place assumes a cold cellar and rapid use. Treat this as a refrigerator pickle, eaten within a few weeks, or process it in sterilised jars following current water-bath canning guidance for pickled green tomatoes.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 pints.
Green tomato pickle was a thrift dish before it was a delicacy: it turns the unripened fruit still on the vine at first frost into something worth keeping. Sweet pickles of this kind, heavy with brown sugar, clove and cinnamon and cut with vinegar, were standard in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American preserving chapters, sitting somewhere between a relish and a condiment for cold meats. Lowney's book, published by a chocolate company, carried the full range of household recipes rather than confectionery alone, and a preserving section was expected in any general cook book of the period. The stone jar in the final line is the older storage method, a glazed crock in the cellar, its contents skimmed and watched.