Home › Pickles › Green Tomato Pickle (One peck of green tomatoes)
Green Tomato Pickle (One peck of green tomatoes)
One peck of green tomatoes, a pint cupful of salt; chop tomatoes and sprinkle over salt and let stand over night. Drain. Chop two pounds of onions, four large green peppers or six small ones, one small box of Coleman's mustard, one ounce celery seed, two quarts of vinegar (not too strong). Cook slowly one hour.
A sharp, sugarless mustard relish of the chow-chow family, built on the end-of-season fruit that will never ripen. The quantities are large and the units are pre-standard, so scale before you start.
- A peck of green tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, which works out to roughly 12-13 lb of tomatoes. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible unless you have a preserving pan of 12 quarts or more.
- "A pint cupful of salt"Two cups of salt, which sounds alarming until you note that it is a drawing salt: it pulls water out overnight and is drained away, not eaten. Use pickling or kosher salt, since iodised table salt clouds the brine. Drain well and press the tomatoes; a quick rinse is reasonable if you find the finished relish too salty.
- Coleman's mustardColman's dry English mustard powder. Period boxes came in several sizes, so the exact quantity is a guess; something on the order of half a cup of powder is what gives this pickle its heat and its body. Do not substitute prepared mustard.
- Celery seed by weightOne ounce of celery seed is about 4 to 5 tablespoons. It is potent and slightly bitter in quantity, so measure rather than eyeball.
- Vinegar strength"Not too strong" reflects a time when household vinegar was unstandardised and its acidity varied from batch to batch. Use standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar undiluted; weakening it further undercuts both the flavour and the preservation.
- The hour of slow cookingSimmer gently and uncovered so the mixture reduces and thickens. A hard boil will scorch the mustard on the bottom of the pan and turn it acrid; stir often, and use a heavy non-reactive pot, never bare aluminium or cast iron.
- No sugarUnlike most modern green tomato relishes this one is entirely savoury. If you expect the sweet supermarket style, taste at the end of the hour and decide before you jar it, keeping in mind that added sugar changes the balance the recipe was built on.
- Keeping itThe recipe stops at the cooking and says nothing about sealing. Refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for pickles if you want shelf storage.
Green tomato pickle appears widely in American community and household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a practical reason: frost arrived before the last of the crop ripened, and a peck of hard green fruit was otherwise a total loss. Chopped, salted overnight and cooked down with onion, pepper, mustard and vinegar, it belongs to the broad family of mustard pickles and chow-chows that the period treated as a standing condiment, spooned out beside boiled beef, pork or baked beans. The named brand is worth noticing: Colman's of Norwich had been milling mustard from 1814, and by 1900 the brand was familiar enough that a cookbook could specify "one small box" without further explanation.