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Tomato and Celery Relish
1 onion. 2 tablespoons sugar. 2/3 cup vinegar. 1 large green pepper 1 large bunch celery finely 2½ cups canned or fresh chopped tomatoes 1 tablespoon salt ⅔ tablespoons sugar 2 allspice berries 2 cup vinegar Mix ingredients, heat gradually to the boiling-point, and cook slowly one and one-half hours. Cayenne or mustard may be added if liked more highly seasoned.
The ingredient list has been mangled by the typesetting, with quantities and items running together; read it as one large green pepper, one large bunch of celery finely chopped, 2½ cups tomatoes, 1 tablespoon salt, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 allspice berries and vinegar. It makes a cooked, vinegar-sharp relish of the chow-chow family rather than a preserve you can put on a shelf.
- The vinegar measure is ambiguousThe text reads "2 cup vinegar," which could stand for either a half cup or two cups. Two cups against 2½ cups of tomato gives a fiercely sour relish that will reduce over the full hour and a half; half a cup is closer to what the finished texture suggests. Start low and add more as it cooks.
- Chop everything fine and evenOnly the celery is told to be finely chopped, but the pepper and tomatoes should match it. The relish is cooked long enough that large pieces of pepper turn to slack ribbons while the celery still has bite.
- Allspice berriesWhole allspice, not ground. Two berries in this quantity is a whisper; tie them in a scrap of cheesecloth so they can be fished out, or use four if you want the spice to register.
- The salt is high by modern tasteA tablespoon of salt in this quantity of vegetables reads as a preserving quantity rather than a seasoning one. If the relish is going straight into the refrigerator, half that is plenty.
- Ninety minutes is not a mistakeThe long slow cook is what drives off water and marries the vinegar into the vegetables. Keep it at a bare simmer in a non-reactive pan — stainless or enamelled, never bare aluminium or cast iron, which the vinegar will pick up as a metallic taste.
- Canned tomatoes need drainingModern canned tomatoes are often packed in a good deal of juice or puree. Drain them, or the mixture may still be soupy at the end of the cooking time.
- StorageNo jars, seals or processing are specified, so treat this as a refrigerator relish and use it within two or three weeks. Do not water-bath and shelf-store it on the strength of these directions — celery and pepper are low-acid and tomatoes only borderline acid, and the acid balance here is unmeasured. For a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested recipe.
- YieldRoughly a pint and a half after the reduction, enough for a large jar. It is a condiment for cold meat, chops and cheese, served by the spoonful.
Relishes of this kind sit at the end of nineteenth-century American cookbooks in a long row — chow-chow, piccalilli, tomato ketchup, pepper hash, cucumber relish — all of them ways of using up a garden glut in a household with no refrigeration. The trick is the same throughout: vinegar, salt, sugar and a long slow cook, which drives off water and leaves something acid enough to keep for a while in a cool larder. Tomatoes appear constantly in these pages, the old suspicion of them having largely faded well before the end of the century, and they were commonly put up at home. What dates this particular recipe is what it leaves out: no jar, no seal, no boiling-water bath, no time at temperature. The reader was assumed to know her own preserving habits, and the book was written before the safe processing of low-acid vegetables was understood in the terms we use now.