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Tomato Picalilli
Chop fine one-half bushel of tomatoes and squeeze them dry, put them into a large bowl, and mix in a couple of dozen minced onions, a dozen chopped green peppers, four ounces of mustard, a little less than a pint of salt, a large root of finely-grated horseradish, and four tablespoonfuls each of powdered cloves and allspice. When thoroughly macerated, put the mixture into a stone jar, pour over enough vinegar to cover, making a slight hollow in the mixture to enable the liquor to get to the bottom of the jar, cover it well, and let it remain until the ingredients are thoroughly saturated. It is then ready for use.
A crock relish written for a hotel larder, in hotel quantities. The whole batch runs to something like ten quarts, so the first job is scaling it down.
- Half a bushel of tomatoesA bushel of tomatoes is about 53 lb, so this calls for roughly 26 lb. Dividing everything by eight gives a workable batch: about 3 1/4 lb tomatoes, 3 onions, 1 to 2 green peppers, 1/2 oz dry mustard, 1/4 cup salt, a 2-inch piece of horseradish, and 1 1/2 teaspoons each of cloves and allspice.
- A pint of saltThis recipe measures its salt by volume; a pint is 2 cups, which is somewhere around a pound or a little more of fine salt. It is doing real preservative work here alongside the vinegar, so do not cut it much. Use pickling or kosher salt without iodine or anti-caking agents, which cloud the brine.
- "Four ounces of mustard"Weight, not volume, and it means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. Four ounces is about 1 cup of powder for the full batch.
- Squeeze them dryThis is the hinge. Tomatoes are mostly water, and any juice left in dilutes the vinegar and gives you a slack, soupy relish that spoils. Salt the chopped tomatoes, let them stand an hour, then press them hard in a colander or twist them in cloth before anything else goes in.
- MaceratedSimply means left to stand until the salt has drawn out liquid and the mixture has softened and slumped, several hours to overnight. There is no cooking anywhere in this recipe.
- VinegarUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, cider or white. Nineteenth-century vinegar strength varied, and the acid is what makes this keep. The hollow in the middle is there so the vinegar sinks through instead of floating on top.
- StorageA glazed stone crock left in a cool cellar was the original plan. Lacking that, pack it into clean jars, keep it under the vinegar, and refrigerate; it is ready in about two weeks and will hold for a few months. For a shelf-stable, sealed product, work from a current tested piccalilli recipe with a measured processing time rather than this one.
- Yield and servingThe scaled-down version above makes roughly a quart to a quart and a half. Serve it cold, a spoonful at a time, with cold meats, chops, fried fish, or beans.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens in the eighteenth century as "India pickle" or "paco lilla," a mixed mustard-and-spice pickle imitating the sharp preserves of the East India trade; the origin of the name is in fact uncertain, though it is often linked to that eighteenth-century borrowing rather than to any single cook. In England it settled into a mustard-thickened cauliflower pickle, while American versions leaned on the tomato, which was cheap, abundant in late summer, and needed using up before frost. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, published this book in 1896, and its pickle chapter reflects a hotel that put up its own condiments in quantity: uncooked, heavily salted, spiced with cloves and allspice, and left in stone jars to come round on their own schedule. The dry mustard and grated horseradish here are the working parts, supplying both bite and a measure of preservative power.