Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › French Tomato Pickle
French Tomato Pickle
One peck green tomatoes, six onions nicely sliced; sprinkle one teacup salt over and stand all night; then drain well and scald in weak vinegar ten or fifteen minutes; drain again and scald with two quarts strong vinegar, one pound sugar, two tablespoons curry powder, two tablespoons turmeric, two teaspoons cinnamon, two teaspoons cloves, two teaspoons allspice, two teaspoons mustard; simmer all together slowly a few minutes. It is a beautiful rich pickle.
A large-batch green tomato pickle in the Anglo-Indian piccalilli mould. The quantities are enormous by modern standards, and everything scales down cleanly by halves or quarters.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, which for green tomatoes works out to roughly 12-13 lb. Quartering the whole recipe gives about 3 lb and still fills two or three pint jars.
- A teacup of saltNineteenth-century teacup measures varied; something in the region of 3/4 cup is the usual modern equivalence, rather than a full measuring cup. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt tends to cloud the brine and can darken the vegetables.
- The overnight salting is the hingeGreen tomatoes hold a great deal of water, and the salt draws it out so the vinegar is not diluted into weakness. Drain thoroughly and press lightly, but do not rinse away all the salt, as no further salt is added later.
- Weak vs. strong vinegarThe first scald was in a weaker vinegar, probably diluted, largely to blanch and leach bitterness; the recipe has you drain it away. The second uses full-strength vinegar; today that means 5 percent acidity cider or white vinegar.
- Turmeric and curry powderTwo tablespoons of turmeric is for colour as much as flavour and will stain wood, plastic and hands. Period curry powders were typically coriander- and turmeric-heavy, though heat levels varied from blend to blend; a modern mild Madras is a reasonable stand-in.
- "Simmer a few minutes"The vegetables should still have bite. Once the spiced vinegar is at a bare simmer, five to ten minutes is enough; longer and the tomato slices collapse into a mush.
- StoragePack hot into clean jars, cover the vegetables completely with the hot vinegar, cool and refrigerate. Treat this as a refrigerator pickle keeping a couple of months; for shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath process rather than the book's silence on sealing.
- YieldThe full recipe makes something in the order of 8-12 pints. The flavour improves markedly after two or three weeks in the jar.
Green tomato pickle was a thrift dish before it was a delicacy: it used the fruit that would never ripen before frost, and versions of it are common in American community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, variously called chow-chow, piccalilli or simply "green tomato pickle." The curry powder and turmeric here place it in the Anglo-Indian line of pickles that reached North American kitchens through British cookery, where turmeric supplied the characteristic yellow and the mustard supplied the bite. The label "French" appears to be doing no geographical work - in the period, "French" was often attached to dishes as a mark of refinement or novelty. Its appearance in The Home Cook Book, a Chicago charity compilation of contributed household receipts, is typical: the recipes came from real kitchens in bulk quantities, assuming a cellar to store the results and a family large enough to eat them.