Home › Catsups And Sauces › Green Tomato Sauce
Green Tomato Sauce
Cut up two gallons of green tomatoes; take three gills black mustard seed, three table-spoons dry mustard, two and a half of black pepper, one and a half allspice, four of salt, two of celery seed, one quart each of chopped onions and sugar, and two and a half quarts good vinegar, a little red pepper to taste. Beat the spices and boil all together until well done.
A green tomato relish in the older sense of "sauce" — thick, sweet-sour, spooned onto meat rather than poured. The quantities are farm-scale and the spice list runs on in a shorthand that needs unpacking.
- The implied unitAfter "three table-spoons dry mustard" the recipe drops the word: "two and a half of black pepper, one and a half allspice, four of salt, two of celery seed" all mean tablespoons. The final "one quart each of chopped onions and sugar" and the vinegar return to liquid measure.
- A gillHalf a cup. Three gills of black mustard seed is 1 1/2 cups, which is a great deal of whole seed and gives the sauce its grainy, mustardy body.
- ScaleTwo gallons of cut-up green tomatoes is somewhere in the region of 12 to 16 lb of fruit, and with the onions, sugar and vinegar the pot starts at about twelve quarts. How much finished sauce you get depends entirely on how far it is cooked down. Quartering the whole recipe gives a manageable batch in a single large pot.
- Black mustard seedBrassica nigra is rarely sold now; the brown seed (B. juncea) found in Indian groceries is the standard substitute and behaves the same way. Yellow seed is milder and blunter.
- "Beat the spices"Whole allspice and peppercorns were bought whole and crushed in a mortar. Crack them coarsely rather than grinding to powder — ground spice muddies the colour and settles out as sediment.
- The hinge: cook it down far enoughGreen tomatoes release a lot of thin liquid, and "until well done" means until the sauce mounds on a spoon and no watery halo separates out. Expect an hour or more of open simmering with frequent stirring, since the sugar will catch on the bottom once it thickens.
- VesselUse stainless steel or enamel. Two and a half quarts of vinegar in bare cast iron or aluminium will take on a metallic taste and grey the tomatoes.
- Keeping itThe original gives no instruction for sealing, and none should be improvised. Treat it as a fresh sauce: cool it, refrigerate it in clean jars, and use it within a few weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested green tomato relish process.
Green tomato sauces belong to the end of the growing season, when frost was coming and the vines still carried fruit that would never ripen. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of ways to use them — chow-chow, piccalilli, sweet pickle, mangoes stuffed and sealed. The Dixie Cook Book was one of the compiled, subscription-sold household volumes that circulated widely in the South in the 1880s, and its measurements assume a large family, a summer garden and a cellar that had to be stocked. The heavy hand with mustard seed, vinegar and sugar is probably not only a matter of taste: all three were among the preservatives available, and proportions like these may well have been what kept a crock from spoiling.