Piccalilla
One peck green tomatoes chopped, one tea-cup salt; cover with water and stand twenty-four hours, then take out and rinse with clear water; chop six red peppers, six onions, one cabbage, put all in a kettle and cover with equal parts of vinegar and water. Scald about twenty minutes, then drain and add one pint molasses, one tablespoon ground cloves, one tablespoon horse radish, two ounces white mustard seed. Put in a jar and cover with cold vinegar.
This is a green-tomato piccalilli of the type made by the bushel each autumn and kept in a cold cellar. As written it is an unprocessed, unsealed preserve with no measured acidity, and it cannot be reproduced safely; the notes below explain the units and where the method fails.
- Why it fails todayThe vegetables are scalded in vinegar cut half-and-half with water, drained, then packed into a jar and topped with cold vinegar. Nothing is brought to a boil in its final liquid, nothing is heat-processed, and no sealing is described — this is a cellar crock pickle, not a canned one.
- Acidity is unknownNineteenth-century vinegar was not standardised, and its acetic acid content could be well below the 5 percent sold now. Green tomatoes, onions and cabbage are all low-acid vegetables, so the finished pH here cannot be predicted, and low-acid, oxygen-poor jarred vegetables are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum.
- The molasses works against youA pint of molasses adds sugar and mineral buffering, which will tend to raise rather than lower the pH of the finished pack. Modern tested relish recipes specify vinegar strength and vinegar-to-vegetable ratios for this kind of reason.
- A peckA dry peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of chopped green tomatoes. This recipe yields something on the order of six to eight quarts of relish — a scale that assumed a large kettle and a cold storage room.
- One tea-cup saltA period teacup runs about 3/4 cup, though the measure is genuinely loose. The 24-hour salting followed by a rinse draws water out of the tomatoes; the rinse also washes away much of the salt, leaving the vinegar to do most of the preserving work.
- Scald twenty minutesTwenty minutes in the diluted vinegar cooks the cabbage and onion to softness — it is a texture step, not a sterilising one, and the vegetables are then drained away from that liquid entirely.
- White mustard seed and horse radishTwo ounces of white (yellow) mustard seed is about 1/3 cup; it is used whole for texture and bite. The horseradish would have been freshly grated root, sharper and more volatile than the vinegar-packed jarred kind.
- If you want to make piccalilliUse a current tested green-tomato relish recipe with specified vinegar strength and a boiling-water process time.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens by the eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian mixed pickle — early cookbooks spell it "paco-lilla" or "picalillo" and describe a mustard-and-turmeric pickle of whatever vegetables were to hand. In America the name was often attached to the end-of-season problem of green tomatoes: fruit that would never ripen before frost, picked by the peckful and turned into relish rather than wasted. The proportions — a peck of tomatoes, a whole cabbage, a pint of molasses — belong to a household putting up its winter stores in quantity, and molasses in place of sugar makes a darker, thriftier relish than the pale turmeric-yellow English version.