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Pickled Green Tomatoes
Tomatoes Cloves Vinegar Let the tomatoes stand in salt water for twelve hours, then stick four or five cloves in each one and pour boiling vinegar over them. Place in jar and set in cool place.
This is a jar pickle with no measured acid, no processing and no refrigeration, and that combination is the reason it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain what the original leaves out and why it matters.
- No acid strength is givenThe recipe says only "vinegar." Household vinegar in 1900 varied widely in strength, and even today cider and wine vinegars are sold anywhere from 4 to 7 percent acetic acid. Safe pickling depends on knowing the acidity, because green tomatoes are a borderline low-acid vegetable rather than a reliably acidic one.
- Pouring hot vinegar over is not processingBoiling vinegar poured into a jar heats the surface and little else. The interior of a whole tomato never reaches a temperature that would matter, and the jar is never held at heat long enough to be considered processed. The result is a sealed, oxygen-poor container of moist vegetable matter of unknown pH.
- The botulism problem specificallyClostridium botulinum spores are common on garden produce and survive boiling. They germinate in low-oxygen, low-acid, room-temperature conditions, which is precisely what a stoppered jar in a "cool place" provides if the acidity falls short. This is the hazard that modern tested pickle recipes are designed around.
- "Cool place" is not a temperatureAn unheated pantry or cellar in a period house might sit anywhere from just above freezing to well into the sixties Fahrenheit depending on the season. Nothing in the recipe distinguishes short-term storage from months on a shelf.
- The twelve-hour salt water is a brine of unknown strengthSalting draws water out of green tomatoes and firms them, but the recipe gives neither a salt weight nor a water volume. A weak brine does little; the step cannot be relied on to contribute any preservation.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested recipe from a food preservation authority, which will specify vinegar acidity, jar size, headspace and boiling-water processing time. Do not adapt the instructions above by guesswork.
- The cloves are the interesting partFour or five whole cloves pushed into each tomato is a distinctive touch worth remembering. Many modern green tomato pickle recipes instead put whole spices loose in the jar.
Green tomato pickles belong to the end-of-season logic that governed much nineteenth and early twentieth century preserving: when frost threatened, the unripened fruit came off the vines and had to be turned into something that would keep. Whole spiced tomatoes, green tomato chow-chow and green tomato mincemeat all appear in American cookbooks of the period. Studding whole fruit with cloves has a long precedent in spiced fruit preserves, where cloves were pressed into pears, quinces or oranges before they went into syrup or vinegar, though a direct line of descent to this recipe cannot be shown. The brevity of the instructions suggests that pickling was assumed to be familiar to the reader, with the printed page serving as a reminder rather than a full instruction. Whatever the assumption, the missing detail is what makes the recipe unusable now.