My Dad's father died in 1936 when my father was 9 years old. He was an only child and was raised by his mother. She worked in a thrift/secondhand store. Money was tight.
My paternal grandmother was a tiny woman. Four bluegill fillets, a carrot and half of a potato were a full meal for her. Consequently, when fishing, we never threw any "keepers" back at the end of the day if there was more than one fish in the creel. After all, that was enough for a meal for Granny.
Every once in a blue moon, Granny would ask my dad for some delicacy that she desired. My dad would pull himself through a knot-hole to get it, even if it was extremely inconvenient. I remember him collecting dandelion greens for her.
He was a good example of a devoted son.
One late-September day, my grandmother asked for green tomatoes. She wanted to make Green Tomato Relish. I remember eating some of it and little else except that her recipe also had sweet corn in it.
I am not a lover of sweet pickles but I do love dill pickles. And I had a good supply of green tomatoes today after clearing a lane between the two rows of tomatoes. Just like my dad had an over-abundance of green tomatoes just before the September frosts.
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| I am soaking the tomatoes over night in calcium-rich pickling juice. Tomorrow I will process them at 180F for 30 minutes. |
I was going to pickle the golf-ball sized fruit whole but I could not fit very many in a jar. The green tomatoes were very firm and undoubtedly have a lot of pectin. It isn't relish but they might end up that way at some time in the future.
For the record, Green Tomato Relish is not a niche thing. There are boatloads of recipes out there.
I don't care about boatloads of recipes: we've lost our own recipe, fools that we are. It went so well with strong cheeses.
ReplyDeleteLubbock county, Texas, 1980-ish. Mom came in late from work. Said there would be a big freeze that night. Our tomatoes had been loaded all summer. We picked big bags of green tomatoes and made chow-chow. I went to bed about mid-night. We canned gallons of it that night. I still remember working with her that night whenever I see chow-chow. (Mrs. Renfro's mild is close to what we made. Excellent on black eyed peas on New Years Day. Why, yes, we did have kin in Alabama back then...)
ReplyDeleteERJ, I have never had such a thing. It seems very much a dish that is not where our people are from. Interested to see how this works out.
ReplyDeleteI think it was a case of waste-not, want-not.
DeletePickles were known as being anti-scurvy but people thought it was the vinegar or lactic acid that was the active agent when it was the tiny traces of ascorbic acid from the immature fruit. Vitamin C/ascorbic acid was first isolated in 1928.
Since we're talking about relish: many years ago Mom grew a surplus of sweet Walla Walla onions. I had a surplus of red Anaheim peppers; I had no idea how prolific the damned things were. So we threw them together into the food processor in equal proportions and Mom used the same recipe as she did for sweet pickle relish, and my God it was (and is) wonderful. Goes great on hot dogs, sandwiches, throw a spoonful into your spaghetti sauce or chili to lend it a bit of sweetness against the savory....
ReplyDeleteMom is gone now. But the recipe remains. Be it yours to hold it high.
Anything with Walla Walla Sweets is superb. But I do remember driving back to Texas on leave with a bag of Walla Walla Sweets in the trunk in the middle of summer. Do you know how quickly they go bad and the mess they make? Oh, the naivety of youth
ReplyDeleteIdaho Bob
Green tomato pie was my Mom's go-to for oversupply. If you didn't look, you couldn't tell it wasn't an apple pie.
ReplyDelete