Piccalilli
3 quarts green tomatoes. 2 heads celery. 4 mild red peppers. 2 mild green peppers. 2 large white onions. 2 large ripe cucumbers. 1 cup salt. 1 1 1/2 quarts cider vinegar. 2 pounds brown sugar. 1/4 cup white mustard seed. 1 teaspoon mustard. 1/2 teaspoons black pepper.
PROCESS: Chop the vegetables, sprinkle with salt and let stand over night. In the morning drain and press in a coarse crash towel to remove all the acrid juice possible. Add vinegar, sugar and spices and simmer until vegetables are tender and clear. Sterilize fruit jars and fill to overflowing. Seal and store.
The relish itself is a conventional vinegar-and-sugar pickle, but the preserving method given here — filling hot jars, sealing, and storing with no processing in a canner — is the discredited "open-kettle" technique, and the quantities as printed are garbled in places. Use a current tested piccalilli recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want jars for the shelf.
- Why the sealing method failsLadling hot relish into jars and screwing on lids relies on the cooling contents pulling a vacuum, but it does nothing to sterilise the headspace, the underside of the lid, or the jar rim, all of which are recontaminated as the food is poured. Modern practice requires a measured boiling-water process timed for the jar size and altitude; without it, mould and yeast spoilage in a sweet, low-strength brine is common.
- The vinegar quantity is unusable"1/2 quarts cider vinegar" is either a typesetting error for 1 1/2 or 2 1/2 quarts, or a fraction with its whole number dropped. Acidity is the main safeguard in a pickle, and a recipe whose acid quantity cannot be read is a recipe that cannot be scaled or trusted. The same applies to "1/2 teaspoons black pepper."
- Vinegar strength has changedNineteenth- and early twentieth-century cider vinegar was of variable and often unlabelled strength, so its acidity cannot be assumed to match the 5 percent acetic acid that supermarket vinegar is standardised to now. Older pickle recipes cannot simply be remade with modern bottled vinegar and assumed equivalent.
- Ripe cucumbers and green tomatoes"Large ripe cucumbers" here most likely means the yellowing, seedy end-of-season fruit rather than a firm pickling cucumber, and such fruit was often peeled and seeded before chopping, though the recipe does not say so. Green tomatoes are unripe slicing tomatoes, still hard and pale.
- "Heads" of celeryA head of celery is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Two heads is a substantial volume of vegetable, roughly in proportion to three quarts of chopped tomato.
- Salting and the crash towelCrash is a coarse open-weave linen. The overnight salting draws water and the bitter juice out of green tomatoes; the pressing is what keeps the finished relish from being watery. This part of the method is sound and is still done, though a colander lined with muslin does the same work.
- The mustard"White mustard seed" is the pale yellow seed sold as yellow mustard seed. The separate teaspoon of "mustard", listed among the dry spices, is most likely dry ground mustard powder rather than prepared table mustard.
- YieldThe book gives none. Three quarts of tomatoes plus the other vegetables, cooked down, will fill somewhere in the region of eight to ten pint jars.
Piccalilli reached American kitchens from England, where the name appears in the eighteenth century for an Indian-inflected mixed pickle heavy with mustard and turmeric; the word's origin is obscure and usually explained as a fanciful coinage on "pickle." The English version stayed pale and mustardy with cauliflower; the American one, of which this is a textbook example, drifted toward chopped green tomatoes, sweet peppers, onions and brown sugar, and was widely used for the unripened crop taken off the vines before the first hard frost. Relishes like this one were a common sharp accompaniment to plain boiled and roasted meat on the American table well into the twentieth century, before commercial condiments took the job over.