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Winter Sauce
Mrs. Snider.
One peck green tomatoes chopped fine, two dozen large onions peeled and chopped, one dozen green or red peppers chopped fine; salt, pepper, and spice to suit taste ; one cup brown sugar, vinegar to cover; pour the vinegar over all boiling hot, and bottle for winter use.
This is a green tomato chow-chow of the sort every nineteenth-century pantry held by the dozen jars, but as written it is a preservation method rather than a cooked dish, and the preservation is the part that has not survived scrutiny. The notes below explain the archaic measures and then why the process itself is the problem.
- A peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly a quarter bushel. Of chopped green tomatoes that is somewhere around 12 to 13 lb, which with two dozen onions puts this at a very large batch by modern standards.
- "Spice to suit taste"Comparable chow-chows of the period commonly used allspice, cloves, cinnamon and mustard seed, sometimes celery seed, but this recipe names none of them and gives no quantity at all, which is characteristic of the book and part of why it cannot be followed as a preserving formula.
- The vinegar is unmeasured"Vinegar to cover" is the pivot of the whole recipe and it is left entirely to the cook. Safe pickling depends on a known ratio of acid to vegetable and on vinegar of known strength; period vinegar varied widely and was often homemade, so neither the volume nor the acidity here is knowable.
- Nothing is actually cookedBoiling vinegar poured over a large mass of cold raw chopped vegetables drops well below simmering almost immediately. The mass never reaches a temperature that would pasteurise it, and the interior of a full crock or jar stays cool for a long time.
- "Bottle" is not canningThere is no sterilising of jars, no headspace, no hot pack, no boiling-water bath and no processing time. A sealed, unprocessed, low-acid vegetable mixture of unknown pH held at room temperature for months is precisely the environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin, and onions and peppers are both low-acid.
- Spoilage you cannot seeBotulinum toxin gives no reliable sign in a pickle jar. Surface mould on an under-acidified pickle is also a real hazard because it raises pH locally and opens the door for other organisms.
- If you want green tomato relishUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity by volume, a measured vegetable weight, and a timed boiling-water bath. Do not adapt this one.
Green tomato relishes like this one exist because of the frost. A late-season tomato patch is full of fruit that will never ripen, and boiling spiced vinegar over the chopped green ones turned a total loss into a winter condiment for cold meat, beans and fried food — hence "winter sauce," a name often said to have been used loosely in American cookbooks for any keeping relish rather than for one fixed formula. The recipe is generally traced to a community cookbook compiled from contributions by named local women, and Mrs. Snider's entry shows the form at its most typical: quantities by the peck and the dozen, seasoning left to the cook's judgement, and no processing instructions at all. That shared knowledge is exactly what modern preserving science replaced with numbers, and it is why recipes of this kind read as incomplete now.