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Chopped Pickles
4 quarts chopped green tomatoes ¾ cup salt 2 teaspoons pepper 3 teaspoons mustard 3 teaspoons cinnamon 3 teaspoons allspice 3 teaspoons cloves ½ cup white mustard seed 4 green peppers, sliced 2 chopped onions 2 quarts vinegar Add salt to tomatoes, cover, let stand twenty-four hours, and drain. Add spices to vinegar, and heat to boilingpoint; then add tomatoes, peppers, and onions, bring to boiling-point, and cook fifteen minutes after boiling-point is reached. Store in a stone jar and keep in a cool place.
A green-tomato chow-chow of the sort made when frost threatened the tomato vines. The method is sound, but the storage instruction belongs to a era of cold cellars and is the one line to disregard.
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as 3/4 cup for 4 quarts of chopped tomatoes, which is in line with other pickle recipes of the period. Use coarse pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt will cloud the brine.
- The salting stageThe 24-hour salting is not seasoning, it is drawing water out so the finished pickle is not soupy. Drain well and press lightly, but do not rinse or the pickle will be flat.
- Vinegar strengthUse cider or distilled vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely, and anything weaker than 5 percent will not preserve chopped vegetables reliably.
- SpicesThe pepper, mustard, cinnamon, allspice and cloves are presumably ground, being measured by the teaspoon and stirred straight into the vinegar; the white mustard seed is listed separately and is whole. Whole spices simmered loose would need a bag and a longer infusion.
- Green tomatoesFully unripe, hard, pale-green fruit, not the half-blushed ones. Ripening tomatoes give up too much liquid and go to mush in fifteen minutes of boiling. Four quarts chopped is roughly 5 to 6 lb whole.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock in a cold cellar was the original vessel. Do not substitute a covered jar left in a modern kitchen cupboard, and avoid old crocks of unknown glaze, which may contain lead.
- Storage todayTreat this as a refrigerator pickle: pack into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled, where it will hold for a couple of months. For anything shelf-stable, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure with a stated processing time rather than this recipe's cool-place instruction.
- YieldFlavour is raw and sharp on the first day and settles after two or three weeks.
Chopped pickle, piccalilli and chow-chow were all names for the same household economy: the green tomatoes, small onions and late peppers left on the plants when the season broke, cut up and preserved in spiced vinegar rather than wasted. The spice list here, heavy on cinnamon, allspice and cloves, is often said to point to the English piccalilli tradition rather than the mustard-and-turmeric relishes that later dominated American jars, though that descent is traditional rather than documented. The relish was eaten with boiled and salted meats, whose plainness it was expected to cut. Storage in a stone crock in a cool place was normal in 1896, when few homes had reliable sealing jars and none had refrigeration, and it is the part of the recipe that has aged worst.