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Governor's Sauce
Cut one-half peck of green tomatoes in slices, lay them in a deep dish, strew over them three or four tablespoonfuls of salt and leave them for one day. Then drain them free from their liquor, lay them in a saucepan with three or four chillies either green or red, three finely-chopped onions, one tablespoonful of grated horseradish, two ounces of brown sugar, one-fourth ounce each of cloves and allspice and one-half teaspoonful each of white and cayenne pepper. Pour in sufficient quantity of vinegar to cover them and cook them over a slow fire. When the tomatoes are soft turn them with the vinegar and other ingredients in small stone or earthenware jars and leave them till cold; then close the jars well, sealing them air-tight, and pack them away for use.
This is a green tomato pickle of the chow-chow family, and the ingredients themselves are unremarkable. The problem is the last sentence: jars filled hot, sealed airtight and "packed away" with no processing and no measured acid.
- Why the sealing step failsThe recipe gives no vinegar quantity beyond "sufficient to cover," no vinegar strength, and no boiling-water processing of the sealed jars. A vegetable pack of that pH cannot be assumed acidic enough to be shelf-stable, and an airtight, unprocessed, low-oxygen jar held at room temperature is exactly the environment Clostridium botulinum needs. Use a current tested relish or pickle recipe if you want a sealed jar.
- Stone jarsThe "small stone or earthenware jars" of 1896 were typically closed with wax, cork or a tied cloth and kept in a cold larder. "Air-tight" here is unlikely to mean the hermetic seal the phrase suggests to a modern reader with two-piece canning lids.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts, two dry gallons; half a peck of sliced tomatoes runs about six pounds. Three or four tablespoons of salt for that weight is a light drawing salt, meant only to pull water out overnight, not to cure.
- Chillies"Three or four chillies" most likely means small hot pods, roughly the size of a modern serrano or cayenne; the recipe allows green or red and does not say whether they go in whole. With half a teaspoon of cayenne on top, the finished sauce is probably warm rather than fiery.
- A quarter ounce each of cloves and allspiceRoughly a tablespoon of whole spice by volume for each. The recipe does not say whether they are whole or ground, though ground clove at that weight would dominate everything else in the pan.
- Slow fireA bare simmer, roughly the lowest setting that keeps bubbles moving. Green tomatoes hold their shape well but the vinegar will reduce and sharpen if it is allowed to boil hard.
- YieldSix pounds of tomatoes with the vinegar probably comes to something on the order of three or four pints, which may be why the original speaks of several small jars rather than one large one.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, filled his book with the pickles, catsups and "sauces" that a nineteenth-century American household was still expected to put up at the end of summer. Green tomato relishes belong to that end-of-season economy: the fruit that would not ripen before frost went into chow-chow, piccalilli and sauces like this one, sharpened with vinegar and warmed with clove, allspice and horseradish to be spooned beside cold meat. Names of this sort — Governor's Sauce, Colonel's Sauce — were conventional flattery in the period rather than records of any particular governor, and no specific origin for this one is documented. What the recipe does record precisely is the standard of the day: salt overnight, cook slow, jar, seal, and trust the vinegar.