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Delicious Mixed Pickle
1 quart green tomatoes. 1 quart red tomatoes. 2 bunches celery. 2 red sweet peppers. 2 large onions. 1 small head of cabbage. 2 ripe cucumbers. Chop all together and add one-half cup salt, let stand until morning and then add two pints vinegar, two pounds brown sugar, one teaspoon mustard and one teaspoon black pepper. Cook until done and seal.
This is an open-kettle pickle of the sort that filled cellar shelves a century ago, and it is the one canning method that current guidance rules out entirely. The problems are in the method and the ratios, not in the cook's skill.
- "Cook until done and seal" is open-kettle canningHot relish is ladled into jars and the lid is trusted to seal as the contents cool. No processing step brings the sealed jar to a temperature that destroys what survives in the headspace, and the vacuum that forms is unreliable. Every current authority has abandoned this method for low-acid vegetables.
- The acid is diluted past the safe rangeTwo pints of vinegar are carrying several quarts of chopped vegetables plus two pounds of sugar. Tomatoes, celery, cabbage, onions, peppers and cucumbers are all low-acid, and the finished pH here is unknown and may well be above the 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. The recipe also gives no vinegar strength, and household vinegar of the period was not standardised at the 5 percent assumed today.
- Ripe cucumbers and cabbage make it worseFully ripe cucumbers are much more watery than small pickling cucumbers, and cabbage releases a great deal of liquid as it cooks. Both dilute whatever acidity the vinegar provides, in an amount that changes with every batch.
- The salt is a seasoning, not a cureHalf a cup of salt standing overnight seasons the vegetables and draws out water; the recipe does not say whether that liquid is poured off. Either way it is nowhere near a preserving concentration once the sugar goes in, so nothing in the jar is doing preservative work except the vinegar.
- Sugar does not preserve at this ratioTwo pounds of sugar across that volume of vegetables gives a relish, not a preserve. Jam and jelly safety depends on sugar concentrations far higher than this.
- No jar or lid technology in common use will fix itThe zinc-capped and glass-lidded jars of Mrs. Wilson's day and the two-piece lids of today both need a measured heat process for a low-acid pickle. If you want a mixed garden pickle, use a tested current recipe with a specified vinegar strength and a timed boiling-water process, or make a small batch as a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a few weeks.
- Quantities are unclear anyway"1 quart green tomatoes" and "1 small head of cabbage" are volume and market measures, not weights, and the text does not say whether the vegetables are measured before or after chopping. There is no way to reconstruct the ratio precisely enough to judge it.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book collects the newspaper and bulletin writing of Mary A. Wilson, a Philadelphia cooking teacher whose reputation rested largely on wartime food conservation, and this pickle belongs to that thrift. It is an end-of-garden recipe: whatever the frost is about to take, chopped together and sweetened, in the family that includes chow-chow, piccalilli and the many regional "mixed pickles" that used up green tomatoes rather than waste them. Green tomatoes appear often in American pickle recipes of the period, in part because a short northern autumn leaves fruit on the vine unripened, and a sweet-sour relish was one standard answer. Its filing under "Candy" here may well be a compositor's or indexer's slip, the kind of dislocation seen in books assembled quickly from previously published columns.