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Green Pickles, Natural
Heat together one gallon of water to each two pounds of pure salt; pour this scalding hot over the washed cucumbers; at the end of three hours pour off and cover with scalding hot, sound cider vinegar. At the end of three days pour this off and scald the cucumbers in fresh vinegar. They will be naturally greened.
VII. Chow-Chow.
To each two quarts of small green cucumbers, or green tomatoes, and the same of cabbage, allow two dozen small onions and half a dozen green mango peppers. Sprinkle the onions or tomatoes with salt, also the cabbage, separately. At the end of six hours press out the water. Cut the onions in half, pour boiling water over them and let them stand for a little while. Cut the green peppers into inch-square pieces, and the cabbage and the tomatoes into pieces of suitable size. The tomatoes, if small, need not be cut. Mix all together. Then, to one teacupful of ground mustard add two cups of white mustard-seed, three tablespoonfuls of turmeric, three of celery-seed, one of mace, one of cayenne pepper and one of ground cinnamon, well mixed. Add boiling vinegar enough to cover. The vinegar should be sweetened with one pound of sugar to cover the whole pickle.
Two recipes run together here: a plain salt-and-vinegar cucumber pickle whose whole selling point is that it stays green without copper, and a mixed chow-chow. Both are worth making, but the instructions assume a cook who already knows what a crock is for.
- Why "natural"Nineteenth-century cooks often greened pickles by scalding them in a copper or brass kettle, which produced verdigris and a vivid green colour along with a genuine risk of copper poisoning. The point of this recipe is that repeated hot brine and hot vinegar hold the colour on their own. Use stainless, enamel or glass, never unlined copper or brass.
- The brineTwo pounds of salt to a gallon of water is a very strong brine, far stronger than a light soaking brine. Use pickling or kosher salt: iodised table salt clouds the liquid and the anti-caking agents leave sediment.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar of the period was variable in strength and often weaker than what is sold now. Buy vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; the acid is what preserves the pickle.
- TeacupfulA teacup is usually reckoned at about six fluid ounces, roughly three-quarters of a modern cup, though usage varied from book to book. So about 3/4 cup ground mustard against 2 cups of whole white mustard seed.
- Green mango peppers"Mango" was standard American usage for a green bell pepper, from the practice of stuffing and pickling them. Six large green bells, seeded and cut into inch squares, is what is meant.
- The cayenneA tablespoon of cayenne across this much pickle is assertive but not extreme; adulteration of cayenne was widely reported in the period, so it may well have been weaker than today's. Start with a teaspoon or two and adjust before the vinegar goes on.
- Draining mattersThe six-hour salting and the pressing are not optional. Undrained cabbage and cucumber will dilute the vinegar and leave you with a slack, watery chow-chow that keeps badly.
- StorageNo jars, seals or processing are mentioned; pickles of this sort were commonly kept in a crock and eaten from the pantry over the winter. Refrigerate what you make, or follow a current tested water-bath processing schedule for mixed vegetable pickles if you want it shelf-stable.
- YieldThe chow-chow comes out at roughly six to eight pints. Give it two weeks before eating; the mustard and turmeric need time to settle into the vegetables.
Chow-chow reached American kitchens through the China trade, and the name is generally traced to pidgin English of the Canton waterfront, where chow-chow meant a mixture or medley and was applied to imported jars of mixed preserves in syrup or mustard. By the middle of the nineteenth century the word had detached from anything Chinese and attached itself to the American end-of-garden pickle: whatever the frost was about to take, chopped small, salted, and put down in sweetened mustard vinegar. Turmeric and the yellow mustard are what distinguish it from a plain mixed pickle, and they explain the colour. Regional versions diverged sharply, the Pennsylvania Dutch leaning sweet and heavy on beans and corn, the Southern versions built on green tomatoes and cabbage, as here. The green pickle recipe above belongs to a different argument of the period entirely, the long campaign in period domestic writing against greening pickles in copper vessels, a practice cooks defended for its colour and doctors condemned for the verdigris it produced.