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Sweet Tomato Pickles
1/2 peck green tomatoes 4 onions 4 green peppers 1 cup salt 1/2 cup white mustard seed 2 teaspoons pepper 3 teaspoons cinnamon 3 teaspoons allspice 3 teaspoons cloves 2 quarts vinegar 1 pound brown sugar Chop tomatoes, onions and peppers; cover with salt and allow to stand over night. Drain, and add to vinegar, spices and sugar which have been heated to boiling. Cook 15 minutes and seal in sterilized jars.
A straightforward end-of-season green tomato relish, of the type usually called chow-chow. The only part that needs rethinking is the sealing method, which predates modern canning guidance.
- Open-kettle sealing is obsoleteLadling hot pickle into jars and sealing, with no further processing, was standard practice in 1900 and is no longer considered reliable — the vacuum is uncertain and the jar rims are easily contaminated. Fill hot jars, leave 1/2 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath according to a current tested time for pickle relish (generally 10-15 minutes, adjusted for altitude).
- Half a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck of green tomatoes is about 4 dry quarts, on the order of 6 to 7 lb whole. Chopped, it comes to a few quarts of pulp, depending on how coarsely it is cut.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period varied; modern cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what current pickling recipes assume. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or artisanal vinegar of unlabelled strength.
- White mustard seedThis is the pale yellow seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed, milder than the brown. Half a cup is a lot by modern standards but correct for a relish of this size — the seeds stay whole and give texture.
- The salting stepThe overnight salt draw is what keeps the pickle from turning watery in the jar. Drain thoroughly and press the vegetables; rinsing once will cut the saltiness, though the original does not call for it.
- SpicesThe teaspoon measures suggest ground cinnamon, allspice and cloves rather than whole, in which case the finished relish will be dark and cloudy. Tying whole spices in cheesecloth and lifting them out before jarring gives a cleaner-looking product with much the same flavour.
- Cooking timeFifteen minutes at a steady boil is enough to soften the tomatoes without collapsing them. Longer cooking drives off vinegar and dulls the peppers.
- YieldHard to fix precisely, but with 2 quarts of vinegar and several quarts of drained vegetables the batch is a large one, well over half a dozen pints. Let the sealed jars stand at least two weeks before opening; the spices need time to marry.
Green tomato pickle is a frost recipe. Every kitchen garden ended the season with fruit that would never ripen, and the standard answer across the northern United States and Canada was to chop it with onions and peppers, salt it overnight, and boil it down in spiced vinegar. Recipes of this shape appear under a range of names — chow-chow, piccalilli, sweet tomato pickle — with chow-chow generally traced to the mixed mustard pickles of the China trade and piccalilli to the older English Indian-style pickles; by the turn of the century the distinctions had blurred and the terms were largely regional. Its appearance in a promotional cookbook is typical of the genre: such books were sold or given away to build brand loyalty, and they filled out their pages with the full range of household cookery, including a preserving section, whether or not the sponsor's product had anything to do with it.