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Ripe Tomato Pickle
3 pints tomatoes, peeled and chopped 1 cup chopped celery 4 tablespoons chopped red 4 tablespoons salt 6 tablespoons sugar 6 tablespoons mustard seed ½ teaspoon clove pepper ½ teaspoon cinnamon 4 tablespoons chopped onion 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg cover. 2 cups vinegar Mix ingredients in order given. Put in a stone jar and This uncooked mixture must stand a week before using, but may be kept a year.
A raw, unheated tomato relish held at room temperature for up to a year in an open crock. The ingredient list has also been scrambled by the typesetter or the scanner. Read it as a document rather than a working procedure.
- Why the storage instruction failsNothing here is cooked, the jar is only covered rather than sealed, and the mixture is meant to sit for a week and then keep twelve months. Raw tomato, celery and onion carry surface yeasts and molds that will colonize the top of a crock at kitchen temperature; there is no heat step and no measured brine strength to stop them.
- The acidity cannot be verifiedRipe tomatoes are borderline low-acid, and 2 cups of vinegar is diluted by roughly 6 cups of tomato pulp and its juice. The finished pH is unknown and unmeasurable in a home kitchen of the period. Modern preserving guidance for tomato products calls for a known vinegar strength, a specified ratio, and a heat process, none of which this recipe supplies.
- Vinegar strength was not standardizedHousehold vinegar of the period was often homemade or barrel cider vinegar of variable acetic acid content. Today's bottled vinegar is labelled at 5 percent; the recipe may have been written for a weaker product, so the original proportions carry no guarantee.
- Salt is a seasoning here, not a preservativeFour tablespoons of salt across roughly two quarts of chopped vegetables is well below the concentration used in a true salt cure or a controlled fermentation. It flavors the relish and draws out juice; it does not make the crock safe for a year.
- The run-together ingredient linesThe line breaks have collapsed in places. "4 tablespoons chopped red" is missing its noun and is presumably red pepper, while "½ teaspoon clove pepper" runs two entries together, clove and pepper; the printed page gives ½ teaspoon, as our text now does. Anyone reading this as a shopping list should supply the missing words.
- Archaic vesselA stone jar is a salt-glazed stoneware crock, closed with a plate, cloth or loose lid. It is not an airtight container, and the recipe gives no storage temperature at all.
- If you want this flavorUse a current, tested recipe for tomato relish or chow-chow with specified vinegar percentage and processing times.
Uncooked pickles and relishes of this kind are common in American cookbooks of the period, where the end of the tomato season meant a household had to absorb a great deal of ripe fruit at once. The seasoning here — mustard seed, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, celery, onion and red pepper in vinegar — belongs to the sweet-spiced chow-chow and piccalilli family, English in ancestry and often traced more distantly to Indian and Southeast Asian pickles brought home through the spice trade. What dates the recipe most clearly is its confidence: a cook judged a preserve by taste, smell and appearance rather than by measured acidity.