Timing is Everything, and Apparently It’s Time for Piccalilli

So, I’m on my hands and knees painting the front porch a lovely shade of deep green when The Gardener pokes his head out the front door.  “How would you like to make some piccalilli?”  he asks.  I wonder what made him think that just then would be a good time to propose a rather labor intensive canning project.  Maybe he figured I needed something to occupy my mind while I concentrated on applying one and a half gallons of paint to the flat wood surface that serves as the main architectural feature on the front of our house.

Apparently we have a few straggler green tomatoes to manage.  When I asked him how many, he cupped his hands into a bowl that I estimate could hold 8-10 tomatoes.    My piccalilli recipe calls for 16 medium sized green tomatoes.  Truth be told, I really like piccalilli.  It goes great with black-eyed peas, so I think I’m going to take the plunge and make a half batch.  I’d make the green tomato pickles described elsewhere in this blog, but I don’t have a jar of good dill pickle juice to work with.

Here’s the recipe, which you can see has been much used over the years.  It comes from the 1977 edition of Stocking Up by Carol Hupping Stoner.  For some reason they left it out of the more recent edition.