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Pickled Tomatoes
4 quarts tomatoes 8 blades mace 1 teaspoon whole cloves 1 teaspoon allspice 2 small red peppers sliced Cider vinegar Choose the small pear-shaped or cherry tomatoes; wash and dry them; put them in glass jars that can be made air-tight. Fill the jars three fourths full; add the spices and peppers and fill to the top with cold vinegar. Set in a cool dark place. This pickle will be ready in three weeks' time.
This is a raw-pack, unprocessed pickle held at room temperature, and that is the problem with it. The notes below explain the terms and then why the method falls outside current preserving practice.
- Why this one failsWhole tomatoes are packed cold into an airtight jar, covered with vinegar, and stored in a cupboard for weeks with no heat processing at all. A sealed jar is an oxygen-free environment, which is exactly the condition Clostridium botulinum needs; the only thing standing between the food and that risk is acidity, and here it is not controlled or measured.
- Intact skins and slow acidificationVinegar acidifies the brine immediately but penetrates whole, unbroken tomatoes very slowly. The flesh at the centre of each fruit can remain above the critical pH of 4.6 for a long stretch of the three-week wait, and nothing in the recipe verifies that it ever drops below it.
- Unspecified vinegar strength"Cider vinegar" in a book of this era could be anything from a weak home-made barrel vinegar to a commercial product. Modern pickling requires vinegar of known acidity, at least 5 per cent, precisely because the margin of safety depends on it.
- Tomatoes are borderline, not acidTomatoes sit close to the pH 4.6 line and some varieties can fall on the wrong side of it, which is why current tested recipes for tomatoes call for added acid in measured amounts plus a timed boiling-water process; neither appears here.
- "Air-tight" without processingThe recipe relies on an air-tight seal and cool, dark storage, but a jar that seals is not a jar that has been processed, and an unprocessed pickle of this kind belongs in the refrigerator with a short shelf life, not in a dark pantry for weeks.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy red aril around the nutmeg seed, dried and sold either as whole "blades" or ground. Whole blades are called for here rather than ground.
- If you want pickled tomatoesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify the vinegar strength, the acid addition and the processing time. Do not adapt this one.
Small pear-shaped and cherry tomatoes were long grown in American kitchen gardens, and their size and firm skins made them candidates for whole-fruit pickling of the sort described here. The spice list — mace, whole cloves, allspice, hot pepper — belongs to the older spiced-pickle tradition, closer to a spiced fruit than to a modern dill brine. Cold-pack cupboard pickles like this one persisted in domestic cookbooks long after processing times for home canning were being published by agricultural authorities.