Home › Sauces, Salads, Pickles and Condiments › Indian Pickle
Indian Pickle
To each gallon of vinegar (cold) add half a pound of mustard, six ounces of turmeric, a handful of salt, and a little grated ginger; boil the vinegar and spices together, and let the mixture cool. Boil or scald the vegetables with vinegar, taking care to have among them a little garlic and onions; put them in your jar, and pour on the pickle. Afterward put in the jar a bag containing a quarter of a pound of ginger, one ounce of long red pepper pods, one of black pepper, one of cloves, and half an ounce of cayenne. If this is too hot for the taste, omit the cayenne to suit.
A gallon-scale Anglo-Indian mixed pickle of the piccalilli type, written for a household that put up vegetables by the crock. The proportions scale down cleanly; the spice quantities are what need attention.
- The stray first word"COLANDER" is almost certainly a printer's error or a fragment of a preceding line — it belongs to no step here. Ignore it and begin at "To each gallon of vinegar."
- Cold, then boiledThe instruction to use cold vinegar and then boil it together with the spices reads as a contradiction. In practice: mix the ground spices into cold vinegar so they disperse without clumping, then bring the whole to a boil and cool it before it meets the vegetables.
- Scale for a modern batchQuarter the recipe for a workable amount: 1 quart cider or malt vinegar (5% acidity), 2 oz (about 1/2 cup) dry mustard powder, 1 1/2 oz (about 6 tbsp) ground turmeric, 1 tbsp salt, a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger. That fills roughly two quart jars of vegetables.
- Mustard means powder"Half a pound of mustard" is dry ground mustard, not prepared table mustard. Eight ounces to the gallon is a heavy hand by modern taste and gives the sharp, sinus-clearing bite these pickles were prized for; half that still reads as an Indian pickle.
- The turmeric is for colourSix ounces a gallon is more than flavour requires; it is largely there to dye the cauliflower and onions the bright yellow associated with these pickles. It stains wood, plastic and hands readily.
- Long red pepper podsThese are whole dried red chillies, the sort sold today as cayenne pods. An ounce is a generous handful. They go into a cloth bag along with the ginger, black pepper, cloves and optional cayenne; the recipe does not say to take the bag out, but bagging the spices makes it possible to pull them once the heat is where you want it.
- VesselsUse glass, glazed stoneware or stainless steel throughout. Vinegar at this strength attacks aluminium and copper and corrodes bare metal lids. The recipe itself specifies only 'your jar'.
- Vegetables and treatmentCauliflower, small onions, green beans, cucumber, green tomatoes and cabbage are the traditional mix, cut to bite size. "Boil or scald" means a brief blanch — a minute or two, just to set the colour and drive out air — not cooking through, or the pickle turns to mush in the jar.
- Keeping and timingThis is a strong-vinegar crock pickle, not a sterilised preserve. Keep it refrigerated, submerged in liquid, and give it four to six weeks before eating so the mustard mellows. Skim or discard if any surface film develops.
"Indian pickle" is one English name for the mixed vegetable pickle also called piccalilli — the two names run alongside each other from the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse's 1758 heading being "To make Paco-Lilla, or India Pickle" — a pickle heavy with mustard, turmeric and chilli, developed in Britain as an approximation of the mango and lime achars that came home with East India Company households. Since fresh green mangoes were unavailable, cooks substituted cauliflower, onions and cucumbers and kept the yellow spice paste, which is why the dish tastes Indian in its seasoning but entirely English in its contents. The formula was remarkably stable — recipes from Hannah Glasse's era onward repeat the same four elements of vinegar, dry mustard, turmeric and a bag of whole spices, usually at gallon scale. The closing permission to "omit the cayenne to suit" is a small piece of period tact: heat was the one variable a cook was invited to control.