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Governor's Sauce (II)
Mrs. H. Baird.
One peck of green tomatoes, four large onions, six red peppers, one teacup grated horse-radish, one teaspoon cayenne and one of black pepper, one teaspoon mustard, half cup of sugar; slice the tomatoes and sprinkle one teacup salt on, and lay all night; drain well in the morning, then simmer all together till cooked through.
A green-tomato relish of the chow-chow family, scaled for a nineteenth-century cellar. Halve or quarter it unless you want gallons.
- A peck of tomatoesA dry peck is 8 quarts, roughly 12-13 lb of green tomatoes. Quartering the recipe gives about 3 lb, which is a manageable batch in a large saucepan.
- Teacup and teaspoonA Victorian teacup is generally taken as about 3/4 cup, though usage varies; a coffee cup was the full cup. The teaspoon of the period was also a little smaller than the modern 5 ml measure, so treat the cayenne and pepper as a starting point.
- There is no vinegarRelated chow-chow and green-tomato pickles usually rely on vinegar, and its absence here is conspicuous. Without it the mixture is a salted, cooked vegetable relish rather than a pickle, and it should not be expected to keep like a vinegar pickle.
- Do not can itThe recipe gives no vinegar, no jars, no processing and no measured acid, so there is nothing here that makes it shelf-stable. Cook it, cool it, refrigerate it and eat it within a week or two, or freeze it in portions.
- The salting is the hingeThe overnight teacup of salt draws out a great deal of water and firms the slices. Drain hard and, unless you want a fiercely salty sauce, rinse briefly and drain again; a full teacup on a quartered batch is far too much.
- Red peppers"Six red peppers" here more likely means ripe hot pods than sweet bell peppers, though the recipe does not say. If they are hot, six of them plus a teaspoon of ground cayenne makes a fiercely hot sauce; use fewer if that is not the intent.
- Horseradish fadesGrated horseradish loses most of its bite within minutes of cooking. If you want it to register, hold back half and stir it in off the heat.
- Simmering"Cooked through" means the tomato slices are translucent and collapsing and the mixture has thickened - roughly 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer, stirring so the sugar does not catch.
- YieldThe full quantity produces something on the order of four to five quarts of relish. A quarter batch fills two pint jars, which is enough for a household.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind - hence the string of named contributors like Mrs. H. Baird, each vouching for her own submission. Grand titles were the fashion for condiments in books of this kind, ordinary green-tomato and chow-chow mixtures dressed up for the table. The dish itself answers a real problem of the northern kitchen, which is what to do with a vine full of tomatoes when the first frost arrives and none of them will ripen. Salting overnight, then simmering with onion, mustard and pepper, turned an unusable crop into something to eat with cold meat all winter - though this particular version, lacking the vinegar its cousins rely on, reads more like a household note than a tested preserving formula.