The sweet vinegar-brined chowchow relish — green tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, and onion chopped fine and put up at the first frost. Spooned over a bowl of pintos or peas, it is the Southern garden's last harvest turned into a year's worth of flavor.
Chowchow is the answer to the end-of-season garden, when frost threatens the green tomatoes still on the vine. Spooned over pinto beans, black-eyed peas, greens, and cornbread, it is a defining condiment of Appalachian and Black Southern tables.
This sweet vinegar-canned chowchow is built from real vegetables — green tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, onion — so it carries fiber, vitamin C, and cabbage glucosinolates, plus acetic acid from the brine that can blunt a starch spike. That is the upside; the downside is the sugar most sweet-relish recipes carry and the canning salt. A spoonful over beans adds flavor and a little vegetable matter without much harm. The lacto-fermented chowchow (the sour kind soured in salt brine) is the more health-forward cousin, adding probiotics — but this sweet vinegar version is still mostly vegetable and far better than a sugary jarred relish.
Chop green tomatoes, cabbage, bell and hot peppers, and onion fine. Salt overnight, drain, then cook briefly in a vinegar-sugar brine spiced with mustard and celery seed and turmeric. Pack hot and water-bath process. Cutting the sugar and leaning on the spices keeps the relish bright with less sweetness.
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