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Green Tomato Pickle (For one peck of sliced green)
For one peck of sliced green tomatoes, allow one-half a pint of salt, one tablespoonful of white mustard seed, one-half of a teaspoonful of cayenne or two chopped green peppers, half a dozen large white onions chopped fine, two pounds of sugar, two quarts of boiling water and four quarts of good cider vinegar. Mix the tomatoes and chopped onion, sprinkle with the salt and let stand over night; drain and boil for twenty minutes in the water and one quart of the vinegar. Then drain again. Add the mustard seed, pepper, sugar, and the remainder of the vinegar and boil slowly for two hours, stirring frequently, that it may not stick or burn. Bottle and seal while hot.
A big end-of-season batch built on the pre-refrigeration scale. The quantities are all workable once translated, but the sealing method is the one part of the procedure current practice has replaced.
- A peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible unless you have a 12-quart preserving kettle.
- Half a pint of saltOne cup. Use pickling or kosher salt: iodized table salt clouds the brine and can darken the vegetables. The overnight salting draws out water so the finished pickle is not thin.
- White mustard seedSold today as yellow mustard seed, the mild round kind used in most pickling spice. One tablespoon for this volume is restrained; two or three will not hurt.
- The two-hour boilThis is the hinge. Two hours of slow boiling with two pounds of sugar and three quarts of vinegar reduces the mixture to something closer to a dark relish or chow-chow than to crisp pickle slices. Use a heavy-bottomed pot and stir often, as the recipe insists, because the sugar will scorch on thin metal.
- Draining twiceBoth drains matter. The first removes the salt water, the second the spent first-stage vinegar, which may also carry off some of the harshness of the unripe fruit. Do not be tempted to keep either liquid.
- "Bottle and seal while hot"This is open-kettle canning, common in period preserving instructions and no longer recommended: the jar rim and lid are not sterilized by the hot contents and the seal is unreliable. Follow a current boiling-water-bath procedure for pickles instead, or simply refrigerate the batch and use it within a couple of months.
- Heat levelHalf a teaspoon of cayenne across a peck of tomatoes is a background warmth, not heat. The alternative of two chopped green peppers is likely milder still; "green peppers" in this period often meant unripe sweet peppers, though hot ones were sometimes intended.
Green tomato pickle turns up often in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a practical reason: frost. A household garden might set out enough tomato plants to feed the family through summer, and when the first hard frost was forecast the unripened fruit had to come off the vines all at once. Salted overnight, boiled with sugar, vinegar, onion and mustard seed, it became one of the sweet-sour chopped pickles the period grouped loosely under names like chow-chow, piccalilli and simply "tomato pickle" — condiments meant to sit on the table beside plain boiled and roasted meat all winter. The heavy hand with sugar and the long reduction are typical of the era's pickle section, where preservation depended entirely on acid, sugar and salt rather than on measured processing times, and where a recipe was expected to be scaled to whatever the garden gave up.