Chow Chow
One quart large cucumbers sliced, two quarts small ones whole, two quarts small onions, two quarts green tomatoes sliced, three heads cauliflower, six large green peppers, one and one-half gallons vinegar, twenty-four tablespoons mustard, one coffee-cup flour, two tea-cups sugar, one ounce tumeric; soak the vegetables in a weak brine over night in separate dishes, cook in the brine they soak in separately; stir the tumeric, flour, mustard and sugar with part of the vinegar, adding the rest slowly; cook in fifteen minutes and pour it over the vegetables, then boil altogether in a pail. Set in a kettle of boiling water until thick enough.
A late-summer mustard pickle on a scale that assumes a garden, a cellar and a large family. Read the quantities before you shop: as written this fills something close to three gallons.
- Scale it down firstOne and a half gallons of vinegar and roughly nine quarts of prepared vegetables is a canning-day batch, not a supper batch. A quarter of the recipe still yields several quarts and fits an 8-quart pot.
- The old cup measuresA coffee-cup was usually reckoned at about a cup and a tea-cup at roughly three-quarters of a cup, though period usage varied, so the thickener works out near 1 cup flour and 1 1/2 cups sugar. Twenty-four tablespoons of mustard is 1 1/2 cups of dry mustard powder, and an ounce of turmeric is about 1/4 cup.
- "Weak brine" is unmeasuredThe original gives no salt ratio, and none can be recovered from the text. A light soaking brine of roughly 1/2 cup pickling salt per gallon of water will serve; because the figure is genuinely absent here, treat the soak as seasoning and drainage rather than preservation.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acidity. Use a standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar, and do not dilute it.
- The hinge: the double boilerA flour-and-mustard paste in vinegar scorches the moment it touches direct heat, and scorched mustard turns the whole batch bitter. "Set in a kettle of boiling water until thick enough" means finish the sauce over water, stirring, not over the flame.
- Cook the vegetables separately and brieflyThe instruction to cook each vegetable in its own brine is not fussiness: cauliflower, onions and green tomatoes soften at very different rates. Small whole cucumbers want only a few minutes; anything cooked to tenderness before the sauce goes on will collapse into mush.
- Mustard cooked 15 minutesThe sauce is boiled long enough to cook out the raw flour taste, which also blunts the sharp volatile heat of the mustard. If you want more bite, hold back a spoonful of the dry mustard and stir it in at the end.
- StorageNothing here describes sealing jars, so treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and use it within a few weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested chow chow recipe with specified processing times.
- ServingThis is a relish, not a side dish: a spoonful alongside cold meat, cheese, beans or fried fish. Expect it to improve after a week.
Chow chow is the English-speaking world's mixed mustard pickle, and the name is generally traced to the pidgin "chow" that came back with the China and India trade, where Anglo-Indian mixed pickles and "chow-chow" preserves were familiar to English speakers by the earlier nineteenth century, though the derivation is not settled. In the kitchen it belongs to the same family as British piccalilli: brined vegetables bound in a boiled sauce of vinegar, dry mustard, sugar and turmeric, the turmeric supplying the yellow that made the pickle recognizable on sight. American versions branched by region, with sweeter cabbage-and-tomato styles associated with Pennsylvania Dutch country and greener, hotter ones with the South, but all of them share a purpose visible in these quantities: they clear the garden of unripened tomatoes, undersized cucumbers and the last cauliflower before frost.