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Green Tomato Pickles
Mrs. Spence.
Slice one peck of tomatoes into a jar, sprinkle a little salt over each layer; let them stand twenty-four hours, drain off the liquor; put the tomatoes into a kettle with a teaspoonful of each of the following spices : ground ginger, allspice, sloves, mace, cinnamon, a teaspoonful of scraped horse-radish, twelve small or three large red peppers, three onions, a cup full of brown suger; cover all with vinegar; boil slowly for three hours.
Neither add to nor take from any of the ingredients or quantities given in the recipe, as it is perfect.
A contributor's recipe of the plainest sort: salt overnight, spice, and a long slow simmer in vinegar. A few of its measures and habits need translating.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is eight dry quarts, which for sliced green tomatoes runs about 12-13 lb. That fills a very large preserving pan once the spices and vinegar go in.
- Typographical slips"Sloves" is cloves and "suger" is sugar. Both look like typesetting errors, though whether they originated with the printer or with the contributor's own hand cannot be known.
- The kettleThe recipe says only "kettle"; a wide, heavy pan is what is wanted. Note that vinegar boiled for hours will pit bare aluminium and attack copper, so stainless or enamelled cast iron is the safer modern choice.
- VinegarCider vinegar of about 5 per cent acidity suits the sweetness, though vinegar strength in the period was not standardised. "Cover all" means simply that the liquid should come over the tomatoes, which release more as they cook.
- Red peppers and horseradishThe twelve small red peppers are dried or fresh hot chillies, not sweet capsicums, and three large ones would be something on the scale of a cayenne. Scraped horseradish means fresh root shaved to a pulp; prepared horseradish from a jar is already in vinegar and much milder.
- Three hours of boilingAt three hours the tomatoes collapse entirely and the result is closer to a dark, jam-like chutney than a sliced pickle. If you want the slices to hold their shape, 45 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer is nearer modern practice; the long boil presumably accounts for the dark finish.
- Draining the salt liquorDo not rinse after draining unless you find the finished pickle too salty. The residual salt is part of the seasoning; the recipe adds none later.
- Keeping itThe recipe stops at the boil and says nothing about sealing. Refrigerate the jars and use within a couple of months, or follow current tested water-bath canning directions for a high-acid pickle if you want them shelf-stable.
- YieldExpect roughly six to eight pints, depending on how far you cook it down.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by local women and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children; it is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind, and its pages are full of named contributors like Mrs. Spence. Green tomato pickle belongs squarely to that domestic economy: frost arrives before the last of the crop ripens, and a peck of hard green fruit that would otherwise rot becomes a winter's worth of sharp relish for cold meat. The spice list -- ginger, allspice, cloves, mace, cinnamon, chillies -- is the standard Anglo-American pickling set of the period, essentially the same warm mixture used in ketchups and chow-chows, and the closing line, forbidding any alteration whatever, is the voice of a contributor who has settled the matter to her own satisfaction and expects no argument.