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Ripe Tomato Pickles
Pare ripe, sound tomatoes (do not scald), put in a jar; scald spices (tied in a bag) in vinegar, and pour while hot over them. This recipe is best for persons who prefer raw tomatoes.
This is a cold-pack vinegar pickle with no measured acid, no salt, no sealing step and no processing. Read it as a record of nineteenth-century practice rather than a working method.
- No quantities at allThe recipe names no weight of tomatoes, no volume of vinegar, no specified spices and no salt. There is nothing to scale, and nothing to check the finished acidity against.
- Vinegar strength was not standardisedHousehold vinegar in the 1880s was often homemade cider vinegar of unknown and variable strength. Safe vinegar pickling depends on knowing the acetic acid percentage (commercial vinegar is now labelled, usually 5 percent) and on a measured ratio of vinegar to produce.
- Tomatoes sit near the acidity lineTomatoes are only borderline acidic, and some varieties test above pH 4.6. A whole peeled tomato packed raw in an unmeasured amount of vinegar may never reach a pH below 4.6 at its centre, which is the threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot produce toxin.
- Hot vinegar is not a heat treatmentPouring scalded vinegar over raw peeled tomatoes in a jar warms the surface but does not heat the interior of a whole fruit, and it does nothing to sterilise the jar or drive out air. "Do not scald" is explicit here: the point of the recipe is that the tomato stays raw.
- No seal and no storage instructionThe original says nothing about closing the jar, about processing it in a boiling-water bath, or about how long it keeps. There is no shelf-stable preserve here.
- "Scald spices in vinegar"This means bringing whole spices, tied in a cloth bag, just to a simmer in the vinegar to draw out their flavour, then pouring the liquid off hot. The bag is so the spices can be lifted out rather than clouding the pickle.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe for tomato pickles, one that specifies weights, vinegar strength, salt and a processing time.
The Dixie Cook-Book, one of the large late-nineteenth-century American household compilations, carries pages of tomato pickles because the tomato harvest arrived all at once and vinegar was a cheap way to hold it. Several of the neighbouring recipes call for green tomatoes, sliced and salted overnight, or for ripe ones cooked down into a spiced catsup or a sweet "mangoe" pickle; this one is unusual in leaving the fruit whole and uncooked, and the compiler says so plainly in the last line. The tomato had become widely accepted in American cooking only over the middle decades of the century, and the closing line suggests that raw tomatoes were still a matter of taste in the period rather than a default.