Any close follower of this piece will be aware that this is the winter of the green tomato.
I started off with my glut, got my fortuitous present of apples and thus was born
Joe Moore’s Chutney.
The first batch was so good that I went looking for more green tomatoes and my kindly veg man at Waterford Market agreed to barter some with me for some of the finished chutney.
These I shared out with Petra and Donal (Donal being Joe Moore’s son)
and made the rest up into more “Joe Moore’s” .
I now have (even after donating several pounds to friends) a fairly healthy 10 kilos of the same, enough to get me over the year and provide quite a few Christmas presents.

On Saturday, son-in law Aonghus Butler arrived in Waterford

with another 3 kilos of green tomatoes,
grown on their balcony in Dun Laoghaire.

Time for a new recipe.

A quick Googling of “Green Tomatoes” reveals a world of recipes.
Apparently in a lot of countries the green tomato because of it’s firm tartness is preferred to the red, particularly for cooking. (The Americans have even called a film “Fried Green Tomatoes” after a café which specialised in same.)
As well as frying there are myriad recipes for chutneys, relishes, jams and
pickles.
Pickled Green Tomatoes rang a bell.
I had memories of trying a Green Tomato Pickle from the great Constance Spry many years ago after a similar glut.
This called for leaving the tomatoes whole and was exceedingly sweet. The resulting pickle looked marvellous, like one of those Italian “Mostarda di Cremona”, but as well as being too sweet, the tomatoes were too “cotton woolly” and, having decorated our dresser for a couple of years it was thrown out.
When I went back to look at her recipe I did however notice that, in her introduction to it, she said “this Danish recipe”
Could it be that she had just gotten the recipe wrong?
It called for 4 pounds of tomatoes to 4 pounds of sugar to a mere half litre of vinegar.(Yes she gave pounds and litres in the same recipe )
Back to Google, but this time looking for Danish Green Tomato Pickle.

There in
http://members.shaw.ca/jliebgott/index.html
I found the following:

Grønne tomater
Green tomatoes
Wash tomatoes and split them in half. sprinkle generously with salt.
Let stand for twenty-four hours. Remove tomatoes and dry in a linen
cloth. For each kg. tomatoes, use 1/2 litre vinegar, 1/2 kg granulated sugar
and a bit of vanilla. Bring vinegar, sugar and vanilla to a boil. add tomatoes
and continue to boil for five minutes. Pour into crocks, cover with wax paper
and tie closed with a string.

This was much better.
The preliminary salting would get rid of a lot of the water from the tomatoes and leave one with a much crisper bite, and the sugar was effectively reduced by a half and the vinegar amount doubled.
Having previously tried it flavoured with vanilla, and not been too impressed, I decided to try an American variation I came across which called for the addition of onion and dill.

First thing I did was to halve and salt the green tomatoes.
Give them a quick rinse first then halve them, put into a china or glass bowl, sprinkle each layer with a couple of tablespoons of salt (purists only use sea salt), for my 2.6 kilos of tomatoes I used about 8 tablespoons.

Now leave for 24 hours.

The following day drain off the water from the tomatoes, the salt will have drawn out a surprising amount.
My original 2.6 kilos was reduced to 1.8 kilos after draining( or roughly by a third)
I then gave these a rough patting with a tea towel to remove any loose water and weighed them again.
Then for every kilo of green tomatoes I weighed half their weight in onions, half their weight in caster sugar and the same in capacity of white malt vinegar ( or you could use white wine or cider vinegar)
My recipe ended up looking like this:
(I decided to call this one after the Son-in- Law who had provided the tomatoes)

Butlers Green Tomato Pickle.
2.60 kilos Green Tomatoes (1.8 kilos after salting)
4 Tablespoons Salt
900 g Onions
900g Caster Sugar
900 ml White Malt Vinegar
4 heads of Dill (or 4 teaspoons of dried Dill)
1 Chilli finely Chopped

Halve the Tomatoes, sprinkle between layers with the salt and leave for 24 hours. Drain, then pat these dry with a cloth and weigh.
Peel and finely slice the onions.
Put the vinegar, sugar and dill in a large pot and bring to the boil.
Simmer together until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Add in the tomatoes, the onions and the chilli
and bring back to the boil.

Boil for 10 to 15 mts or until the tomatoes are soft

but still holding their shape.

Cool and pot as for jam.
One small tip I discovered is that a great way to make sure your jam jars are sterile is to give them a wash in the dish washer. This saves an awful amount of fiddling about with boiling water.

The final result is quite delicious. Sharper and crisper than the chutney and interestingly reminiscent of ( but much better than!) the Dill Pickle they use in Mc Donald’s!

The finished product.