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Celery Relish
1 quart can tomatoes 1 quart celery--chopped very fine 1 pint onions--chopped very fine 2 tablespoons salt 1/4 cup lemon juice Cook the tomatoes, celery and onions covered until very tender and quite thick. When almost done, add the salt. Add the lemon juice at the very last.
A cooked, vinegar-free relish that depends on long reduction and a late hit of acid. Two things need adjusting: the salt is heavy by current taste, and the lid has to come off if it is ever going to thicken.
- Quart can tomatoesAbout 32 fl oz — near enough two standard 14.5-oz cans, or one 28-oz can. Whole peeled tomatoes crushed by hand give a better texture than pre-diced, which are treated with calcium chloride and stay stubbornly cubed.
- Quart of celery, pint of onionsThese are volume measures of the already-chopped vegetable, not whole ones. A quart of finely chopped celery is roughly one large bunch, about 1 lb trimmed; a pint of onions is 2 cups, about 10 oz, or two medium onions.
- Covered, then uncovered"Covered until very tender and quite thick" is self-contradictory. Sweat it covered for the first 20 minutes to soften the celery, then finish uncovered so the tomato water can leave. Expect 45 to 60 minutes total over medium-low heat, stirring near the end.
- The saltTwo tablespoons in this volume is heavy by current taste and may reflect period salting habits. Start with two teaspoons, add at the end as directed, and taste up from there.
- Lemon juice lastThis is the one instruction worth obeying exactly. Cooked-off citrus tastes flat and faintly bitter; added off the heat it keeps the relish tasting fresh and sharpens the celery.
- Not a canning recipeTomato, celery and onion together are borderline low-acid, and the quarter cup of lemon juice here is a seasoning, not a measured acidification. Treat it as a refrigerator relish — cool, cover, keep in the fridge and use within a week, or freeze in small containers. For shelf-stable jars, use a current tested recipe with specified acid levels.
- YieldRoughly 1 to 1 1/2 pints after reduction, depending how far it is taken. Enough to serve eight alongside a loaf, a bean dish or a grain patty.
Meatless Cookery sits in the early twentieth-century American meatless literature, a body of writing driven variously by health argument and, in the war years, by official urging that households observe meatless days so that meat and fat could go abroad; which impulse dominates in this particular book should not be assumed from the title alone. Books of this kind lean on relishes and condiments: a bright, salty, acidic spoonful does much of the work that a meat gravy used to do, making a plate of beans, rice or vegetable loaf taste finished. Celery is a telling choice — through the late nineteenth century it was a prestige American vegetable, served in tall glass celery vases at table and closely associated with the muck fields around Kalamazoo, Michigan, but by the 1910s it was cheap and abundant enough to be chopped by the quart. The use of lemon juice rather than vinegar is the unusual note here; vinegar was the standard relish acid, and lemon gives a rounder, less biting result.