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Ripe Tomato Pickle
Pare and weigh ripe tomatoes and put into jars and just cover with vinegar; after standing three days pour off the vinegar and add five pounds coffee sugar to every seven of fruit; spice to taste and pour over tomatoes and cook slowly all day on the back of the stove. Use cinnamon, mace and a little cloves, or not any, as preferred.
A sweet pickle in the older sense: whole peeled fruit steeped in vinegar, then candied slowly in a spiced vinegar syrup until the syrup thickens. The proportions are given by weight, which is the only reliable way to follow it.
- Coffee sugarNineteenth-century "coffee sugar" was a coarse, lightly refined granulated sugar sold for sweetening coffee. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight.
- The weight ratioFive pounds sugar to seven pounds peeled fruit is close to 1:1.4. The long slow cooking, rather than the sugar proportion alone, is what thickens the syrup. Weigh the tomatoes after peeling, as instructed, not before.
- Peeling"Pare" here means skin them. A 15-second dip in boiling water and then cold water slips the skins off far more cleanly than a knife, and keeps the fruit whole.
- Choose the right tomatoSmall, firm, meaty tomatoes -- plum or paste types, or yellow pear and cherry tomatoes -- hold their shape through a long cook. Large slicing tomatoes collapse into sauce.
- VesselsUse glass, stoneware or stainless for the three-day vinegar steep and a stainless or enameled pan for cooking. Vinegar and acid fruit will pick up metal off aluminum, copper or bare cast iron.
- VinegarCider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is a reasonable modern choice. Household vinegar of the period varied in strength, and the original gives no measure beyond "just cover."
- "Back of the stove" and "all day"On a wood range the back was the coolest zone -- a bare simmer. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, uncovered, roughly 4 to 6 hours, until the syrup coats a spoon and the fruit is translucent. Stir gently and rarely; the point is evaporation, not agitation.
- SpicesWhole spices tied in cheesecloth are easier than ground, which clouds the syrup and can turn it muddy over a long cook. Figure a stick or two of cinnamon, a few blades of mace and no more than six cloves for this quantity -- cloves dominate quickly.
- StorageTreat the finished pickle as a refrigerator preserve: pack into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled, where it will hold for a month or more. The recipe gives no processing time or seal, so do not put it up for shelf storage without following a current tested tomato-pickle procedure.
- YieldThe original gives no yield. Depending on how far the syrup is reduced, expect somewhere in the region of six pints.
Sweet pickles -- fruit cooked down in sugar and vinegar with warm spices -- were a fixture of American preserving shelves through the nineteenth century, sitting somewhere between a condiment and a confection and eaten alongside cold roast meat. That tomatoes appear in this company is itself a marker of the period: the fruit had only become broadly respectable in American kitchens over the middle decades of the century, and cookbooks of the 1880s hedge their bets by offering it every way at once, as soup, catsup, sauce, mangoes and sweet pickle. The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of thick, subscription-sold compilations of that era, published in Atlanta for a Southern market though adapted from the Midwestern Buckeye books, assembled largely from contributed household receipts, which is why instructions like "spice to taste" and "cook slowly all day on the back of the stove" pass without further comment -- the writer seems to have assumed a reader who already knew what her own range did.