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Cucumber Salad
One dozen ripe cucumbers, wash, pair and cut in strips, then into small pieces about the size of dice, taking out all the seeds; twelve large white onions, chopped, six large green peppers chopped, one-fourth pound each of white and black mustard seed, one gill celery seed; after having prepared the cucumbers onions and peppers, add one tea-cup salt, and put them in a cotton bag to drain for twenty-four hours; after this is done, add the spices and celery seed, pack in a jar and fill with good cold vinegar.
An uncooked, cold-packed cucumber relish scaled for a household putting up supper relishes by the crockful. The measurements are large but consistent; the main work is dicing and the 24-hour drain.
- "Ripe cucumbers" means mature, not fresh-pickedIn this period a ripe cucumber is one grown full size, pale or yellowing, with tough skin and developed seeds — which is why the recipe tells you to pare it and take out all the seeds. Modern slicing cucumbers work; peel them and scrape out the seed core with a spoon so the relish is not watery.
- "Pair" is pareA printer's spelling, not an instruction to halve. Peel the cucumbers.
- A gill and a tea-cupA gill is half a cup, so half a cup of celery seed. A tea-cup of the period runs roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup; take it as about 3/4 cup of salt for this volume of vegetables, and use pickling or kosher salt, as iodized salt clouds the brine.
- The mustard seedA quarter pound each of white and black is about 2/3 cup of each. White (yellow) mustard seed is unchanged; true black mustard is uncommon in shops now, and brown mustard seed is the standard substitute — slightly hotter, otherwise the same job.
- The drain is the hingeThe drain matters -- Twenty-four hours of salting in a cloth bag draws the water out of the vegetables. Skipping or shortening it leaves water behind that dilutes the vinegar and gives a slack, weakly acid relish. Set the bag in a colander over a bowl and let it go the full day.
- Vinegar strength"Cold" here means unheated, as against the boiled vinegar of cooked mustard pickles. Use plain cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not water it down; the acid is doing all the preserving here, since nothing is cooked or sealed.
- StorageThis is a crock pickle, not a canned one. Keep the jar covered in the refrigerator, with the vegetables submerged, and treat it as a keep-for-weeks relish rather than a shelf-stable one. Flavour improves after several days as the mustard and celery seed bloom.
- YieldA dozen cucumbers, a dozen onions and six peppers give roughly four to five quarts once drained. Halve or quarter the whole thing for a normal household; the proportions scale cleanly.
Uncooked cucumber-and-onion relishes bound with mustard and celery seed and covered with cold vinegar appear widely in nineteenth-century American recipe collections under a shifting set of names -- cucumber salad, chopped pickle, chow-chow, mustard pickle -- with the dividing lines between them never very firm. This one belongs to the cold-pack side of that family: the vegetables are salted and drained rather than boiled, where the older "cooked" mustard pickles scalded their vinegar. Nineteenth-century supper was generally the light meal, cold sliced meats and bread, and a sharp jarred relish was a standard accompaniment. Calling a jar of pickle a "salad" reflects an older, looser sense of the word, closer to a dish of dressed raw vegetables than to anything served on leaves.