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Chopped Pickles
Take a peck green tomatoes, wash clean, cut away a small piece from each end, slice and place in a large wooden bowl, chop fine, place in a crock and mix salt with them (half pint to a peck), let stand twenty-four hours, and drain thoroughly; take twice or three times as much cabbage as there is chopped tomatoes, chop fine, mix salt in same proportions, add enough water to make moist, and let stand same time as tomatoes; drain, place again in separate jars, cover each with cold weak vinegar; after twenty-four hours drain cabbage well, pressing hard to extract all the juice; place tomatoes and the vinegar in a porcelain kettle and let them boil for three minutes, stirring all the time, pour out, and when cold, place in a towel and wring and press until perfectly dry; now mix tomatoes and cabbage together, take a double handful at a time, squeeze as tightly as possible, and place in a dry crock; take the stone jar in which they are to be pickled, place in it a layer of tomatoes and cabbage, scatter over with chopped peppers, whole mustard seed, and horse-radish, then another layer of tomatoes and cabbage, next spice, and so on until jar is almost full, occasionally sprinkling with cayenne pepper; cover with strong cider vinegar, to each gallon of which a tea-cup of sugar has been added. Place a saucer or pieces of broken china on the pickles to keep them under the vinegar. If a white scum rises, drain off vinegar, boil, skim, and pour hot over the pickles. Prepare mustard, peppers, and horse-radish, as follows: Take three green or ripe garden peppers (four table-spoons when chopped), cut in two, place in salt water over night, the next morning drain and chop quite fine; to two table-spoons mustard-seed add salt-spoon salt, pour in boiling water, let stand fifteen minutes and drain; two table-spoons horse-radish chopped fine. Tomatoes and onions are excellent prepared in the same way. For sliced pickles, take cucumbers and onions, or tomatoes and onions, and slice and prepare as above. - Mrs. W. W. W.
A crock-scale chow-chow built on end-of-season green tomatoes and cabbage. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the whole method turns on one thing: getting the vegetables genuinely dry before they meet the finishing vinegar.
- The hinge: press until dryEvery step of draining, boiling, wringing in a towel and squeezing by the handful exists to keep the vegetables from diluting the final vinegar. Water left in the cabbage weakens the acid that preserves the pickle and gives you a slack, cloudy jar. Press harder than feels reasonable.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12-14 lb of green tomatoes. The recipe then calls for two or three times as much cabbage as there is chopped tomato, so the finished batch is a crock-filling quantity. Scaling to a quarter or an eighth gives a manageable amount and keeps all the proportions intact.
- Salt measuresHalf a pint of salt is one cup by volume, per peck of tomatoes, with the same ratio for the cabbage. Use pickling or coarse kosher salt; iodized table salt clouds the brine and its finer grain makes a cup considerably saltier by weight.
- Weak vinegar and strong vinegarThe "cold weak vinegar" of the soaking stage was often household vinegar cut with water; it is a rinse, not a preservative, and gets discarded. The finishing vinegar must be full-strength cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is the standard on any modern supermarket bottle.
- Small measuresA salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon. A tea-cup of sugar per gallon of vinegar is roughly three-quarters of a cup by modern measure.
- VesselsA porcelain kettle means an enamelled or enamel-lined pan. Any non-reactive pot works; avoid bare aluminium or cast iron, which react with vinegar and darken the pickle. The stone jar is a glazed stoneware crock, and the saucer and broken china are simply a weight to keep everything submerged, a role a zip bag of brine or a glass fermentation weight fills better.
- ChoppingThe wooden bowl and chopping knife produce an irregular, coarse mince. A food processor pulsed briefly gets close; run it too long and the cabbage turns to purée, which will not drain.
- Storage, and the scumThis is an open-crock pickle, not a canned one. The instruction to draw off, boil and skim the vinegar when white scum appears assumes a cool cellar and regular attention. Pack the finished pickle into clean jars and keep it refrigerated instead; do not treat it as shelf-stable. Anyone wanting sealed jars for the pantry should follow a current tested procedure for pickle relish rather than this one.
- Yield and servingA full batch runs to several gallons. It is a condiment relish: a spoonful alongside beans, greens, cold meat or fried fish, not a side dish in its own right.
Chopped pickle of this kind is the dish most of the American South and Midwest came to call chow-chow, a mixed vegetable relish carried through the last of the garden before frost. Green tomatoes were its natural base because they were abundant and useless for anything else, and cabbage stretched them cheaply. The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the same family of compiled, contributor-credited household books as Buckeye Cookery, and recipes signed with initials like "Mrs. W. W. W." came in from readers and church circles rather than from a single author, which is why the measures shift between pecks, pints, tea-cups and double handfuls within one paragraph. The name chow-chow is generally traced to Chinese-derived pidgin for mixed preserves, though the connection is traditional rather than documented, and the technique here, salting to draw water then packing in spiced vinegar, is straightforward English pickling practice applied to a New World glut.