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Green Tomato Soy
Thinly slice two gallons of green tomatoes (not peeled) and twelve good-sized onions, and add one quart of vinegar; one quart of sugar; three tablespoons of salt; two tablespoons of pepper; two tablespoons of ground mustard; one tablespoon of allspice and one tablespoon of cloves. Mix all together thoroughly, and stew slowly until the tomatoes and onions are tender, stirring frequently. Put up in wide-mouthed bottles or in pint jars.
This is a green tomato relish of the chow-chow family, and the flavor logic is sound. The preserving instructions are not: the recipe stops at "put up in wide-mouthed bottles or in pint jars" with no processing at all, and the acid ratio is too low and too uncertain for a sealed, shelf-stable jar.
- No heat processingThe stewed mixture is simply ladled into jars and left. Nothing establishes a seal or destroys spoilage organisms in the sealed container, and a low-acid, low-oxygen jar held at room temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum. Modern tested pickle recipes call for a measured boiling-water bath timed to jar size.
- The acid ratio is too thinOne quart of vinegar has to acidify roughly two gallons of sliced green tomatoes plus twelve onions, and both release their own water as they stew. Green tomatoes are more acid than ripe ones but still not reliably below pH 4.6 on their own, and onions are firmly low-acid. Current relish recipes carry far more vinegar in proportion, and specify it.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthThe recipe says only "vinegar," with no acidity stated and no way to know what the cook had on hand. Safe pickling depends on vinegar of a stated 5 percent acetic acid; without that number the calculation cannot be made at all.
- The sugar does not preserve hereA quart of sugar sounds like a lot, but spread through two gallons of vegetables it produces a relish, not a preserve. The concentration is nowhere near the level at which sugar itself inhibits microbial growth, so it contributes nothing to safety.
- "Wide-mouthed bottles"Bottles of this kind are not sealable canning vessels. Even with correct acidity and processing, they have no place in modern home canning.
- If you want green tomato relishUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give you vinegar strength, headspace and a processing time. The spicing here — mustard, allspice, cloves — is the interesting part and transfers readily.
"Soy" in nineteenth-century American and British cookery had drifted well away from soy sauce: it named any dark, sweet-sour, heavily spiced bottled condiment poured over cold meat, and green tomato soy was one of them. Recipes of this shape were driven by the calendar rather than by taste. A gardener facing the first hard frost had bushels of tomatoes that would never ripen, and slicing them thin with onions, vinegar, sugar and the standard pickling spices turned an otherwise total loss into a winter's worth of relish. The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, when a home cook was still expected to judge a seal by eye and nose; the science of processing times and measured acidity had not yet reached the general household manuals.