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Mixed Pickles
1 Peck Green Tomatoes 6 Large Onions 1 Cup Salt 1 Quart Cider Vinegar 3 Pounds Brown Sugar 1/8 Pound White Mustard Seed 1 Teaspoon each Ground Cloves and Ginger 2 Teaspoons of Mustard 1 Teaspoon of Cayenne Pepper Slice tomatoes into earthen jar with the onions and pour salt over them. Let stand twenty-four hours and drain. Add other ingredients and cook slowly for fifteen minutes.
A green tomato relish of the sweet-and-spiced type, built on a 24-hour dry salting. The quantities are large by modern standards and the original assumes you know what to do with the finished pickle once it is cooked.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, which works out to roughly 12-13 lb of green tomatoes. Halving or quartering the whole recipe is sensible unless you are putting up a season's worth.
- The earthen jarAny non-reactive vessel does the job: glass, stainless steel, or a food-safe crock. Avoid bare aluminium, copper and old glazed earthenware, since the salt and vinegar will pull at reactive surfaces and antique glazes can carry lead.
- Salt and drainingA full cup of salt over 12 lb of tomatoes is a curing dose, not a seasoning dose. Most of it leaves with the drained brine, but do not rinse-and-squeeze the slices dry or you will lose the texture the salting bought you; a firm drain in a colander is enough.
- "2 teaspoons of mustard"Listed separately from the white mustard seed above it, so this most likely means dry ground mustard powder. Prepared table mustard would thin the mixture and add its own vinegar.
- Cook slowly for fifteen minutesThis is the hinge. Fifteen minutes at a bare simmer is meant to dissolve 3 lb of sugar and marry the spices while leaving the tomato slices intact. Boil it hard and you get a dull brown sauce instead of a pickle with slices in it.
- CayenneA teaspoon across this volume reads as warmth rather than heat. Modern cayenne is more consistently hot than the ground red pepper of the period, so taste at the end of the cooking rather than adding more up front.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a very large batch, several quarts at least. The recipe stops at the pot and says nothing about sealing: refrigerate what you make and use it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested canning procedure for green tomato relish if you want shelf storage.
- ServingTreat it as a condiment for cold meat, beans, or fried fish, a tablespoon or two at a time, rather than as a side dish.
Green tomato pickle is a frost recipe: at the end of the season a gardener is left with fruit that will never ripen, and salting, spicing and sweetening it turned that surplus into something that kept. Recipes of this shape run through American and British household books from the mid-nineteenth century onward under a range of names, chow-chow among them, and the spice list here, cloves, ginger, mustard seed and cayenne, is the standard sweet-pickle set of the period rather than anything regional. What such a recipe describes is not just a dinner but a putting-up season, measured in pecks and quarts and dealt with in an earthen jar on the pantry floor.