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Pickles
Mrs. H. Baird.
Slice one peck green tomatoes, and one quart small white onions, each in a separate dish, with a small teacup of salt on them; to stand over night. Drain well, then take two quarts vinegar, one pound brown sugar, a few pepper pods, capsicums, some mace and ginger root, and put all together and simmer until tender. A very nice pickle.
A green tomato pickle of the standard nineteenth-century pattern: overnight salting, then a short simmer in sweetened spiced vinegar. The quantities are large by modern standards and the vessel matters more than the recipe admits.
- A peck of green tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes. Halving or quartering the whole recipe is sensible unless you are putting up a winter's worth.
- The teacup of saltTeacup measures were not standardised; the figure usually given is somewhere around 3/4 cup, and this one is specified as small. The wording implies that much on each dish, tomatoes and onions separately. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized salt clouds the brine and can darken the onions.
- Drain well means drain wellThis is the hinge of the recipe. The overnight salt pulls a great deal of water out of the tomatoes, and if you leave it behind you dilute the vinegar and end up with a slack, under-acidified pickle. Drain in a colander, then press gently; do not rinse.
- Capsicums and pepper podsBoth were period names for hot red peppers, and nothing in the text tells us whether two different things are meant. Four to six small dried red chillies for a full batch gives a modest heat. Mace is the outer casing of nutmeg, sold as blades; whole ginger root, sliced, not powdered.
- Vinegar strengthThe strength of the vinegar intended here cannot be known from the text, and household vinegar varied. Use commercial cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, and do not thin it with water.
- Non-reactive panTwo quarts of vinegar will strip copper, brass and bare cast iron and take on a metallic taste. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron only.
- Simmer until tenderExpect 40 minutes to an hour for the tomato slices to turn translucent and the onions to lose their crunch. Push much past that and the slices collapse into relish.
- Yield and keepingA full batch makes a great deal, well over the two quarts of vinegar it starts with. The recipe gives no sealing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle: cool, jar, refrigerate, and use within a couple of months. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure rather than this text.
Green tomato pickle was one of the great thrift dishes of the American kitchen garden, a use for the fruit still hanging when frost threatened and there was no hope of it ripening. Recipes of this shape — tomatoes and onions salted overnight, then simmered in spiced vinegar with brown sugar — run through community and charity cookbooks from the middle of the century onward, and related preparations survive in the South as chow-chow and in the Midwest as green tomato relish. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1876) was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this one carries Mrs. H. Baird's signature and her closing verdict rather than any editorial voice; before reliable home canning a household's winter vegetables were largely whatever it had managed to put down in salt or vinegar.