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Green Tomato Pickle
Take eight pounds of green tomatoes and chop fine, add four pounds brown sugar and boil down three hours, add a quart of vinegar, a teaspoon each of mace, cinnamon and cloves, and boil about fifteen minutes; let cool and put into jars or other vessels. Try this recipe once and you will try it again. -Mrs. W. A. Croffut, New York City.
A sweet spiced tomato preserve closer to what we would now call a chutney than a brined pickle. The recipe is sound, but the three-hour reduction and the storage instruction both need attention.
- The hinge: watch the reductionEight pounds of chopped tomatoes and four pounds of sugar will scorch the moment the mass thickens. Use a wide, heavy-bottomed preserving pan, keep the heat at a bare simmer, and stir down to the bottom every ten minutes or so through the last hour. The three hours is a guide, not a rule; stop when the mixture mounds on a spoon.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely. Use a standard 5 percent acidity cider or white vinegar so the finished pickle is reliably acid; the vinegar goes in only at the end, after the long reduction, and boils for just fifteen minutes.
- SpicesA teaspoon each most likely means ground spice. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself; if you cannot find it, ground nutmeg will stand in, used sparingly.
- Green tomatoesFirm, fully unripe fruit, not merely under-ripe. They hold their texture through the long cooking and bring the tartness that keeps the four pounds of sugar from cloying. Core them but there is no need to peel.
- Chop fineBy hand, or a few short pulses in a food processor. Anything approaching a purée will catch on the pan bottom long before three hours are up.
- Storage, which the recipe skips"Jars or other vessels" reflects a kitchen that expected to eat this within the season. Fill clean jars, cool, and keep refrigerated, where it holds for a month or more. For shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath processing schedule for tomato relish rather than simply sealing a warm jar.
- YieldRoughly six to seven pints, depending on how far the reduction is taken. The quantities halve cleanly, though a smaller batch will reach the same thickness well before three hours.
- ServingSweet-sour and heavily spiced; a relish of this kind suits cold roast meat or ham rather than being eaten as a cucumber pickle would be.
Green tomato pickles and sweet "mangoes" fill the preserving chapters of American community cookbooks from the 1870s onward for a practical reason: a killing frost left gardeners with pounds of fruit that would never ripen, and sugar and vinegar were the way to save it. The Dixie Cook Book (first issued in the 1880s and reprinted for decades) was assembled from contributed receipts, and the signature here is the point of the entry as much as the method — Mrs. W. A. Croffut of New York City stands behind it, and the closing line, "Try this recipe once and you will try it again," is the voice of a contributor vouching for her own work. Such books traded on that kind of personal warranty, since there was no test kitchen; the reputation of the woman who sent it in was the guarantee.