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Green Tomato Sauce
4 quarts green tomatoes 1/2 small onion 1 pint vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon mustard 1 tablespoon black pepper 1 tablespoon whole allspice and cloves Wash the tomatoes; remove the stem and blossom ends; slice them without peeling and put them to soak in salt and water over night. In the morning drain them; add the other ingredients and stew until tender. Keep in glass jars.
This is an open-kettle preserve: the sauce is cooked in a pot and ladled into jars with no processing step, no headspace, no seal check and no measured acidity. That method is no longer considered safe for a vegetable pickle, and the specific reasons are worth spelling out.
- The acid is too dilute to rely onOne pint of vinegar for four quarts of sliced tomatoes plus onion is roughly a 1:8 ratio by volume, and the tomatoes themselves release a great deal of water as they stew. Modern tested tomato relishes call for far more vinegar relative to solids, because the finished pH must be at or below 4.6 to block Clostridium botulinum. Nothing in this recipe lets you know where you have landed.
- Green tomatoes are not a reliably acid foodUnripe tomatoes are somewhat more acidic than ripe ones, but tomato pH varies by variety, season and soil, and the added onion pushes it the wrong way. Tomatoes are treated as a borderline food in current canning guidance precisely because they cannot be assumed acidic enough on their own.
- No heat process at allNo processing in the jar — the sauce is stewed before filling, but "Keep in glass jars" means hot sauce into jars and a lid on top. That may kill surface spoilage organisms but does nothing about botulinum spores, which survive boiling and can germinate in a sealed, low-oxygen, low-acid jar. Any seal formed as the jar cools is incidental and cannot be relied on.
- The overnight salt soak is not a cureSoaking the slices in brine overnight draws out water and firms the texture, and the brine is poured off in the morning. The tablespoon of salt added afterwards with the other ingredients is far too little to preserve four quarts of tomatoes. Neither the soak nor the added salt should be counted on for the safety of the finished jar.
- Spoilage here is not visibleBotulinum toxin produces no reliable off smell, no gas in every case and no cloudiness you can count on. A jar of this that looks and smells fine can still be dangerous, which is why the fault cannot be managed by inspection.
- If you want green tomato sauceUse a current, laboratory-tested recipe from a extension service or a modern preserving manual, with a stated vinegar strength, jar size and boiling-water processing time.
- Reading the measurementsA tablespoon of "mustard" here is most likely dry mustard powder, and "whole allspice and cloves" most plausibly means one tablespoon of the two combined, though the line can also be read as one of each. Four quarts of sliced green tomatoes is roughly six pounds of fruit.
Green tomato relishes and sauces were a fixture of American household books through the nineteenth century onward for a simple agricultural reason: the first hard frost arrived while the vines were still carrying quantities of fruit that would never ripen, and nothing was wasted. Chow-chow, green tomato pickle, mincemeat made with green tomatoes and sauces like this one all belong to that end-of-season salvage tradition. What such books did not yet have was any laboratory understanding of pH thresholds or spore survival; the science that made open-kettle canning obsolete came later.