Hancock Shaker Village India Relish

This condiment contains green tomatoes. Theoretically, green tomatoes are available all summer long if you can just go out to your garden and pick them. In practice, with most people buying their produce from a farm store or farmers market, October is green tomato season. It's getting colder in the mid Atlantic. When I go out to walk the puppy in the mornings, I wish for a hat and gloves.  Farmers are anticipating the first frost. Pick those suckers now, while people are still coming for fresh local produce. Don't wait for the frost.
Last Wednesday, Bob and I hustled out to the Bethesda Women's Farm Market early to buy our green tomatoes. At first I was afraid that I would have to drive to the Homestead Farm in Poolesville, which, this time of year, is like a convention center for preschoolers and their teachers. Yellow buses park in ranks, disgorging young kids to visit the pumpkin patch. But, luckily, I was spared the drive, as a man named Ray had baskets of lovely pale green tomatoes at his stall.
On Saturday afternoon, after noticing that the green on the tomatoes was starting to shade into a pale orange in a few spots, I decided I had better get busy and turn the tomatoes into relish before they all ripened. This happened twice last year. Baskets of green tomatoes became red tomatoes before I got around to canning them. So even though I had to go to the grocery store. I began chopping and measuring.
The only potentially hard to find ingredient in this recipe is citron. Citron, according to Wikipedia, is an actual citrus fruit. However, the pulp, the part of the other citrus fruits we eat or squeeze into juice, is not very good. What you get when you buy citron is the candied flesh of the inner rind. It is used for fruit cake, mincemeat and other vaguely esoteric foods. You can buy it on line at .www.nuts.com, among other places.
The relish is sweet and tart at the same time, due to the vinegar and sugar. In the 19th century, cooks served relishes to spark up their meals. Wikipedia says that relishes came from India. However, the website warns that the article on relishes "has multiple issues" so we can take that with a grain of salt (or sugar.).
You may be wondering what to do with India relish once you make it. First of all,  you have to remember you have it. Bob wants to move all the canned goods canned by me downstairs to the laundry room where they could be displayed on shelves at eye level.  Right now, they are all jammed together on a shelf in the upper reaches of the pantry. then, I would do what the 19th Century cooks did, and serve your relish with a meat dinner, roast chicken, roast beef, roast pork. Or, you can spread them on crackers and make an hors d'oeurve with brie or cheddar cheese and a dab of relish.
This recipe requires sealing in a boiling water bath. That means a great big canning kettle with a rack so you can lift up the jars. Hewitt does not give us any guidance about time. Sadly, neither do the various state cooperative extensions that have websites devoted to safe canning. I guess it is a bit much to expect home extension agents to determine canning times for every conceivable food people want to can. The website Seasoned Advice, at www.stackexchange.com, suggests that the cook use the processing time for the ingredient with the longest processing time. In this case, the processing time would be 40 minutes. Don't forget to sterilize your jars and lids.

Hancock Shaker Village India Relish

8 pounds very small green tomatoes (you may have to make do with regular-size tomatoes)
8 cups light brown sugar or maple sugar
2 cups water
3 sticks cinnamon
2 tablespoons ground ginger
3 lemons very thinly sliced
2 cups citron, shredded. (It comes diced now.)
3 cups raisins
Peel of one small orange, finely chopped

1. Wash to tomatoes and cut into quarters (or smaller pieces if using regular size tomatoes)
2. Bring the sugar and water to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves and simmer tow to three minutes. Add tomatoes and remaining ingredients. Simmer, stirring, three hours, or until lemon slices and citron peel look transparent and tomatoes are very tender. Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal. Cool and store in a cool, dark, dry place. Serve with cold meat. Makes eight to ten pints.

Quince Marmalade

Quince Marmalade is the last of the unusual and may I say daunting, marmalade recipes in the Northeast section of the New York Times Heritage Cookbook. Whoever heard of cucumber marmalade, or carrot marmalade or tomato marmalade? Not me. Marmalade came from Dundee, in Scotland,  in those white ceramic jars which one then appropriated to put one's pencils in.
Quinces present their own special problem, namely, what are they, and where do you get them? I thought quinces were bright orange, had a smooth skin like a tomato, and sort of a star shaped stem end. I thought I had seen them at Magruder's grocery story in Chevy Chase a couple of years ago. I had  inquired of a fruit and vegetable man at Whole Foods as to when they were available. He told me quinces come in the fall.
When it got to be fall, mid September, I started scratching around grocery stores and the Internet looking for the things.
They were tougher to run down than I would have thought. Harris Teeter might have them in a few weeks. Whole Foods didn't  have them at all. I was shown some uninspiring specimens at the Davenport Safeway and rejected them. I finally found what appeared to be good quality quinces at the Safeway in Potomac. Yay Safeway. They weren't what I had expected at all. They were a pale green with a shape like a lemon on steroids. The fruit and vegetable man told  me they turned yellow when they ripened.
I stuck them in the ornamental fruit bowl on the table and waited to see if they would ripen. Wikipedia tells us that they do not ripen on the tree unless they are frosted and subsequently decay (Huh?). Wikipedia also refers to their strong perfume. I don't have the sharpest nose on the block, but these quinces were not particularly fragrant. Wikipedia also says that quinces, which should properly be referred to in the plural as quince, are not usually eaten raw. I'm  not surprised.
On the first of October, just before we were due to leave for Massachusetts, I decided I had better deal with the quince. I did not want to return to a bowlful of rotten quince.
This recipe, as always, presents certain problems. First of all, it says, four to six medium size quince. Okay. I suspect my quince are bigger than the ones the cook had in mind. I used six. "Put them in a pan" the recipe says.  I guess the author of the recipe had her quince jelly pan in mind. I used the big saucepan. Even then, the quinces wouldn't all fit. One sat on top of the other four. The recipe instructed me to cover it three-quarters of the way with water. Well, in order to have any water at all touching the quince perched on top of the others, I had to use more water than the recipe inferred that I should use.As a result, I had to boil it longer to get the fruit to "jam." But that is getting ahead of myself.
First I had to scald the quince in order to peel them. Peeling my quince was unlike peeling any other fruit, such as peaches, where if one scalds them, the peels slide right off. After doubling the boiling time to account for the quince on top of the other four underwater, I ended  up peeling them with a potato peeler.
Boiling took longer than anticipated. After all, it always does when I make marmalade. I believe in this case the cause was I used more water than the author of the recipe used. Since I don't know how much she used, it is impossible to use the same amount. But I do think I used more because I covered my quince in order to partially submerge the one sitting on top of the others.
How does it taste? Sweet, but without a definite fruit flavor. Even though it contains orange juice and orange peel, it does not taste of oranges. If you want to try this, now's the time, while quince are somewhat available. You do not need a boiling water bath. To can it, one need only boil the clean jars to sterilize them,  put the hot jam in the jars and cover the jam with melted paraffin.

Quince Marmalade

4 to six medium-sized quinces (Sorry, can't help you there. I would say, get what you can.)
grated rind and juice of one orange
2 apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1 teaspoon finely chopped yellow part of lemon peel
sugar (a lot. Buy a five pound bag) 

1. Wash the quince. Place in a pan and add water to three-quarters cover. Bring to a boil and simmer ten minutes.
2. Remove the quince from the cooking liquid. Peel and core the quince, returning the skin and cores to the cooking liquid. Chop the quince and reserve.
3. Cook the skin and cores slowly thirty minutes. Strain and reserve liquid.
4. Place the chopped quince, grated rind and juice of the orange, apples and lemon peel in a heavy pan. Add reserved liquid until pulp is covered by one-half-inch liquid. Bring to boil and simmer gently until fruit is very tender. Mash the fruit. (I used a potato masher.)
5. Measure the pulp into a pan and add three-quarters cup sugar for each cup of pulp. Heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Boil rapidly until a set is reached, about ten minutes. (It took me over an hour.) )To test for set, put a drop of mixture on a saucer, refrigerate and push your finger into the cooled drop of marmalade. Your finger should leave a clean path when the marmalade is done.)
6. Pour the marmalade into hot sterilized jelly glasses, pour a thin layer of paraffin over and cool. Cover and store in a cool, dark, dry lace. Makes  about 6 six ounce jelly jars.

Winchester Center Bread and Butter Pickles.

On Sunday, Bob and I loaded up the last of my ancestral crap into a U-Haul and drove back to Washington. My house is being sold to a young man who almost certainly cannot afford it. But, hey, at this point, it will be the bank's problem not mine. Now our house looks like a second hand furniture warehouse, although Bob is doing his best to put things up in the attic. I am dithering.
But, Wednesday, I popped out of bed early (early when you are retired is 7:15) and drove off through rush hour traffic to the Bethesda Women's Farm Market. It was time for pickling. The farm market is a remnant of the days when the fields that now hold McMansions were sown with corn, alfalfa, and orchards. There are three or four vegetable purveyors but the rest of the booths sell flowers, photographs, baked goods and Indian food.
The first booth right next to the door is run by a comfortable looking woman who had the most enormous cucumbers you have ever seen. Rather than checking out the other booths, I plunged right in and started loading my bag with these mini baseball bat sized creatures. I bought 12 of them. The recipe called for 25, and I was pretty sure that the author had smaller cucumbers in mind.  With Hewlett's usual lack of specific information, it did not say what size cucumbers. The recipe called for 8 "small" onions. If you remember, I believe that a small onion is about the size of a ping pong ball. Cucumber lady didn't have small onions. She had softball size onions, undoubtedly gotten from a wholesaler. I bought 4.
I got home with my bag of outsize bounty and started to look into the jar question. I have been canning for 35 years. Bob and I used to go out to Prince George's County on Labor Day to pick tomatoes which were then made into sauce and canned. When the children were little I canned massive amounts of apple sauce. So I have canning jars. Sort of.
Sort of means the shelves in the basement are filled with Mason jar boxes. Some of them are full of jars. Some of them are empty. Some of them are filled with bags of lids and rings. It depends on the size. In recent years I have mostly been making condiments and sauces that I canned in the smallest, jelly jar size. And, I gave them away. So in June, when I made apple blueberry conserve, I had to scour the shelves in the pantry for jars. But pint jars we had in plenty. I was able to come up with a full dozen wide mouth pints. I popped the jars into the dishwasher, in order to keep the number of scalds at a minimum. Hint. Canning jars do have to be sterilized, but the dishwasher does an excellent job.
Then, as Hurricane Isaac flapped the trousers of the newscasters in New Orleans and the Republican delegates to the convention flapped their jaws, I pickled. I finally got the last batch sealed and cooled  Thursday afternoon. It's a great feeling.
Since I believe that people want to know the origins of the names of these dishes, here's what I found.
Winchester Center. Connecticut is in Litchfield County. LItchfield County is, in parts even more tony than Berkshire County. The nearest town to Winchester Center is Winsted, a distinctly lower crust precinct of an otherwise elevated locale. Winsted featured prominently on the list of towns my mother hated, along with Golden's Bridge, New York. Winsted had had a flood in the 1950s which swept away half the town. Every time my mother drove through Winsted, on her way to West Hartford, where she used to go shopping, she would express a wish that the flood had swept away the whole thing.
Anyhow, Winchester Center might be very nice. Despite a childhood spent driving though the highways and byways of Litchfield County on my way to field hockey games, softball games and the very occasional birthday party, I never happened upon it. Wikapedia does say that Ralph Nader is from there, although Winsted usually claims him as a native son.
But at some point, a native daughter produced these pickles. Now you know where the pickles were produced, I can also tell you why they are called bread and butter pickles. Maybe. One Wikapedia answer is, that during the Depression they were as common on the table as bread and butter. Another answer, on ask.com is that they tasted like bread and butter.
I would go for Wikapedia, myself. They taste like sweet pickles, not bread and butter.
Now, hints for the new canner. If you really think you want to do this regularly, get the equipment. You need a ten gallon aluminum pot with a rack to put the jars in, a jar lifter, which you use to fish the rings, lids and jars out of boiling water, and a wide mouth funnel, which keeps cleanup to a minimum. Most of this stuff should be available in your local hardware store. But don't wait until October. Buy now.
About this recipe. It says clearly, heat until it comes to just below the boiling point. Otherwise, as I can attest, the cucumbers get mushy. I would advise buying the pickle size cucumbers which are available now in farmers' markets. If you use yellow onions which don't seem to come in pingpong ball size, use three to four of the larger ones.
I am not going to reproduce the Ball Corporation's instructions for canning. However, follow their directions. I think it is okay to cut corners by washing your jars in the dishwasher, but sterilize the rings and lids in boiling water. More complete directions are available from Ball on http://www.freshpreserving.com. There are many more home canning websites as well.

Winchester Center Bread and Butter Pickles

1 gallon cucumbers (about twenty-five pickling cucumbers)
8 small onions, chopped
1 green pepper, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup coarse salt
2 quarts ice cubes
4 cups sugar
3 1/2 cups cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
1 tablespoon celery seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 tablespoons mustard seeds

1. Wash the cucumbers and slice thinly into a large (crockery)  bowl or crock. Add the onions, green pepper and salt. Mix. Top with the ice cubes. (They take the bitterness out of the cucumbers.)Let stand at room temperature eight  hours. Drain. Rinse lightly.
2. Combine the remaining ingredients in a kettle and add cucumber mixture.Heat, stirring to dissolve sugar, until mixture comes to just below the boiling point. Pack into hot sterilized jars. Seal. (Read the Ball Corporation's instructions on sealing the jars.) Cool. Store in cool, dry, dark place. Makes ten pints.