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Pickled Tomatoes
Put enough vinegar to cover a peck of tomatoes into a saucepan with one ounce each of black pepper and cloves, and two ounces of mustard seed. Prick one peck of tomatoes all over, and let so much of the juice as possible run into the saucepan with the vinegar; boil well, stirring often, and allow the liquor to get quite cold. Put the tomatoes in layers in a deep pan with salt sprinkled over them, and at the end of three days wash off all the salt. Put them back into the deep pan or jar, pour over the vinegar taking care that it is quite cold, cover, and in the course of ten or twelve days the pickle will be ready for use.
This is a raw-pack, unprocessed pickle held at room temperature for nearly two weeks, and the two things that would make it safe — the acidity of the vinegar and the concentration of the salt — are both left unstated. The notes below explain the specific gaps rather than patching them.
- Tomatoes sit on the acid borderlineRipe tomatoes run roughly pH 4.3 to 4.9, and some varieties, along with over-ripe fruit, fall above the 4.6 line that separates acid from low-acid foods. Above that line Clostridium botulinum can grow in an anaerobic, unrefrigerated jar. Current tested tomato pickles specify added acid for exactly this reason.
- The vinegar strength is unknownNineteenth-century household vinegar was frequently home-made or cider vinegar of variable and often low acidity. "Enough vinegar to cover" gives no ratio of vinegar to produce, so the finished brine's acidity cannot be predicted, and it is further diluted by the tomato juice deliberately added to the pan.
- The salt cure is unmeasured"Layers in a deep pan with salt sprinkled over them" for three days is a dry cure with no weight, no percentage and no temperature. A cure either draws enough water and holds enough salt to suppress spoilage organisms or it does not, and there is no way to tell which from this instruction. The salt is then washed off, so whatever it contributes to the keeping of the finished pickle cannot be relied on.
- Nothing is ever heated with the tomatoesThe spiced vinegar is boiled alone and then deliberately cooled before it touches the fruit. The tomatoes themselves are never heated at any stage, and the jar is "covered" rather than sealed and processed. There is no kill step and no hermetic seal.
- Pricking the fruit works against itPricking lets brine in, but it also opens the interior of every tomato to whatever is on the skin and in the crock, and floods the vinegar with dilute tomato juice before the pickle is even assembled.
- A peck, for referenceA peck is eight dry quarts, about 12 to 13 pounds of tomatoes — a large crock's worth. The ounce each of black pepper and cloves and two ounces of mustard seed are seasoning quantities only and have no preservative effect at this scale.
- If you want pickled tomatoesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give a fixed vinegar-to-water ratio, a measured salt weight and either a water-bath process or refrigerated storage with a stated shelf life.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and lent his name to this 1896 volume, filled its back sections with the kind of preserving and larder work a hotel kitchen still did in-house. Pickled tomatoes were an ordinary American household preserve by the 1890s, and were often made with green fruit at the end of the season to salvage what would not ripen, though the ripe-fruit version here is closer to a spiced vinegar pickle than to a chutney. The three-day salting followed by a cold spiced vinegar is a very old European pickling pattern, applied to a vegetable that was already in common American use, whatever the persistent folk tradition about its once-suspect reputation. What the recipe really records is a period in which preserving was governed by the cook's judgement and the crock in the cellar rather than by measured acidity — the science of safe home canning was not codified until well into the twentieth century.