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A Better Chow Chow
Take the white part of one head of cabbage, two medium heads of cauliflower, one quart of string beans, one quart of very small cucumbers, six roots of celeriac, six mango (sweet) peppers, one quart of small white onions and two quarts of green tomatoes. Boil each of these articles separatelyexcept the cucumbers, which must be scalded in vinegar-until just done, but not soft. The cauliflower may be pulled apart, piece by piece, and the rest of the vegetables cut into suitable pieces, rather fine. If the cucumbers are not very small, they may also be cut; but if small, pack all the ingredients in a jar in regular layers, or mixed, so some of each may be taken out together. Then prepare the following pickle: Two gallons of strong cider vinegar, four ounces of mustard, four ounces white mustard-seed, a pot of French mustard, one ounce of cloves and two ounces of turmeric. Put the spices and vinegar into an enameled kettle, and when they come to a boil, pour over the vegetables. A pound of sugar and any spices liked may be added to the pickles, and any vegetables may be added to or omitted, if you keep the proportions correct. The vinegar must cover the whole completely, and it is a good plan to place a follower in the jar, to keep the chow-chow submerged. Chow-chow may be made by salting, draining, cutting into proper pieces and then scalding the vegetables in weak brine, packing and pouring over the dressing or pickle. Small martynias, nasturtiums, okra, Chili pepper, very young radish pods, or anything of the like kind add to the value-because to the variety of chow-chow, but according to the addition of Chili pepper, omit the mango pepper.
A full end-of-garden pickle at nineteenth-century scale: roughly two gallons of prepared vegetables under two gallons of vinegar. Read it as a template with proportions rather than a fixed formula, which is how the author clearly intended it.
- The hinge: cook each vegetable just short of doneEverything is boiled separately because cauliflower, string beans, onions and green tomatoes all soften at different rates. Pull each one while it still has resistance; anything cooked through will collapse into mush after weeks in hot vinegar.
- Scale it downAs written this fills a five-gallon crock. A quarter batch — about 2 quarts of mixed vegetables to 2 quarts of vinegar with 1 oz dry mustard, 1 oz white mustard seed, 1/4 oz cloves and 1/2 oz turmeric — keeps the ratios intact and fits a large stockpot.
- "Mango peppers"Sweet peppers; the recipe says as much in its own parenthesis. In nineteenth-century American usage "mango" was applied to vegetables hollowed out, stuffed and pickled — melons and cucumbers as well as peppers — and the name is usually explained as a carry-over from imported pickled mangoes.
- Mustard, three ways"Four ounces of mustard" is dry mustard powder; the white mustard-seed goes in whole and stays whole; "a pot of French mustard" means a small jar of smooth prepared mustard, a Dijon type. The turmeric is there for the yellow colour as much as the flavour.
- Celeriac and martyniasCeleriac is the knobby celery root. Martynia is the unripe seed pod of the devil's-claw plant, once grown for pickling and now essentially unobtainable; young okra or green bean pods do the same job.
- VesselsThe instruction to use an enameled kettle matters. Two gallons of hot vinegar will strip unlined copper, pit aluminium and turn bare cast iron black and metallic-tasting. Enamel, stainless or glass only. A "follower" is a plate or wooden disc weighted down to hold the vegetables under the brine.
- StorageThis is an open-crock pickle, kept cold and eaten from over the winter — not a sealed shelf-stable preserve. Refrigerate it, keep everything submerged, and if you want jars for the pantry use a current tested boiling-water-bath recipe with a measured 5% vinegar and a stated processing time.
- SugarThe pound of sugar is optional here but worth adding; strong cider vinegar at this concentration is bracing, and many later chow-chow recipes are noticeably sweeter.
Chow-chow is the American branch of a large family of mixed mustard pickles that came out of the British colonial trade in India and the China ports; the name is generally traced to the pidgin "chow-chow," meaning a mixture or medley of odds and ends, and it arrived attached to the sweet-and-sour piccalilli style rather than to any single vegetable. In the United States it became above all a thrift dish, the way a garden was emptied before frost — hence the green tomatoes, the undersized cucumbers and the author's cheerful permission to add or omit vegetables so long as the proportions hold. Pennsylvania German households made it in quantity and it is still sold there, sweeter and more mustard-yellow than the versions of the Carolinas, where chow-chow leans on cabbage and green tomato and lands beside a plate of beans. A recipe titled "A Better Chow Chow" tells you plainly that the dish was common enough to have disappointing versions worth improving on.