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Ripe Tomato Soy
Take a bushel of ripe tomatoes, skin and cut them in slices; sprinkle the bottom of a tub with salt; put in a layer of tomatoes, cover with salt; add more tomatoes and salt until all are in the tub. Cover the top with a thick layer of sliced onions; let stand three days; turn into a large kettle, set over the fire and let boil very slowly for eight hours, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Take from the fire and stand aside over night. In the morning strain and press through a wire sieve; add four pods of red peppers chopped fine, an ounce of ground cloves, two ounces each of allspice and black pepper. Return to the kettle; set over a slow fire and let boil until very thick and smooth. When cool, put in small jars and seal. CHOW-CHOW-To make chow-chow, take the following ingredients: One green pepper; four quarts green tomatoes (medium size); six small onions; one head of celery; one pint of peeled and chopped cucumbers; one cup of sugar (either brown or white); one saltspoon (heaping) of ground cinnamon; one saltspoon (heaping) of ground allspice, one tablespoon (scant) of ground mustard; onehalf teacup of salt and one quart of vinegar. Chop the tomatoes, add the salt, and mix. Next morning drain the tomatoes, and add the onions, cucumbers, peppers, and celery, finely chopped, the vinegar and spices. Put the mixture in an enamel kettle, and boil slowly for six hours. Stir well with a wooden spoon, and pack in glass or stone jars.
Two condiments from the same page: a long-boiled tomato "soy" and a chow-chow relish. Both are written for open-kettle sealing, a preserving method that current canning guidance no longer accepts, and the tomato soy has no acid in it at all.
- Why the soy failsSalted sliced tomatoes and onions stand in a tub for three days at room temperature, then go into jars that are simply sealed — the soy cold, by its own instruction — with no measured acid and no processing. Tomatoes sit right at the borderline of pH 4.6, onions are firmly low-acid, and a sealed low-acid jar held at room temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum. Nothing in the eight hours of boiling protects the jar after it cools.
- Why the chow-chow fails tooA quart of vinegar to more than four quarts of chopped vegetables — four quarts of tomatoes alone, before the cucumbers, onions, celery and pepper — gives no reliable finished acidity, and the recipe calls for packing into jars with no water-bath or pressure processing and no headspace, lid or timing given. Use a current tested pickle or relish recipe if you want to put either of these up; both need measured acid and a measured process.
- The salt is a flavouring, not a cureThe half teacup of salt in the chow-chow is a seasoning quantity, well short of what would preserve a low-acid vegetable. The salt layered over the tomatoes in the soy is given no measure at all relative to the vegetables, so there is no way to know what strength was intended; neither can be relied on as a cure.
- A bushel of tomatoesAbout 53 lb, or some 20 quarts sliced. This is a farmhouse batch scaled to a wash-tub and a day at the stove, which is worth knowing before you read the eight-hour boil as a misprint.
- Saltspoon and teacupA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cinnamon and allspice in the chow-chow are a heaping quarter teaspoon each. A teacup of the period is variously reckoned at anything from a half to three-quarters of a cup, and varied from house to house.
- Four pods of red peppersGenuinely ambiguous. "Pods" could mean small dried cayennes or fresh field peppers several inches long, and the heat of the finished soy would differ by an order of magnitude between the two readings.
- Enamel and wooden spoonsThe instruction to use an enamel kettle and a wooden spoon is sound and still is. Bare iron, copper and tin all react with vinegar and with the acid in tomatoes, darkening the relish and picking up a metallic taste over a six-hour boil.
In nineteenth-century American and English cookery "soy" had drifted loose from soybeans: imported Chinese and Japanese soy sauce was expensive and admired, and cooks answered it with dark, thin, heavily spiced bottled sauces made from whatever was abundant, so a book of this period will offer mushroom catsup, walnut catsup and tomato soy side by side, all of them table sauces poured over meat rather than the thick sweet ketchup we now expect. Chow-chow came into English kitchens by the other end of the same trade route, its name generally traced to a pidgin term for mixed odds and ends, and by 1900 it meant a mustard-spiced mixed pickle of end-of-season garden vegetables. That both recipes lean on green and ripe tomatoes in quantity places them squarely in the September glut, and their presence in the Butterick book, published by a dress-pattern company for women running households on a budget, shows how much of a home cook's autumn still went into filling shelves for winter.