Pickles Mixed
Thirty large cucumbers cut in pieces, two large heads cauliflower, two quarts small onions, four quarts small cucumbers, half a pint white mustard seed, one-half cup ground black pepper, one-half cup cinnamon, one cup tumeric; pack pickles, cauliflower and onions in salt over night, take one cup salt and mix through them, they will make their own brine. In the morning drain them out and put them in fresh water and soak for a day or two; change the water twice a day until they are fresh enough, then drain very dry, put in a large jar, putting the spice in alternately with the other ingredients. Then boil six quarts vinegar with three pounds brown sugar and pour over while hot. Do this three mornings in succession.
A crock-scale mixed pickle of the chow-chow type, built on a long salt cure and three successive scaldings with sweetened vinegar. Everything about it assumes a household putting up a winter's relish at once.
- Scale it downThirty large cucumbers plus four quarts of small ones, two cauliflowers and two quarts of onions is roughly five gallons of finished pickle. A quarter of the recipe still fills several quart jars; the proportions divide cleanly.
- The hinge: three scaldings, not onePouring boiling vinegar over the vegetables on three consecutive mornings is what makes this work. Repeated passes draw in acid and sugar gradually, so the cucumbers stay firmer than they would under a single long boil. The recipe does not say whether the vinegar is renewed each morning; the usual reading is to drain the syrup off, bring it back to a boil, and pour it over again.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of white mustard seed is one cup. The cup of turmeric and half-cup each of ground black pepper and cinnamon are large amounts, but they are what the recipe calls for at this volume; the turmeric gives the yellow color and the black pepper the heat.
- Ground spice will cloud the brineHalf a cup of ground cinnamon layered in among the vegetables leaves a muddy sediment. Tying the cinnamon (and the pepper, if you like a clearer syrup) in cheesecloth and boiling it with the vinegar gives the same flavor and a cleaner jar. The mustard seed and turmeric are meant to stay in.
- Salting and fresheningA cup of salt mixed through the vegetables overnight draws its own brine, as the recipe says. The soaking that follows is judged by taste, not by clock: keep changing the water twice daily until a piece tastes seasoned rather than salty, usually one to two days. Drain and blot genuinely dry or the vinegar is diluted.
- CucumbersUse pickling cucumbers, not waxed salad cucumbers, and trim a slice from the blossom end of each, which carries enzymes that soften pickles. Cut the large ones into pieces of a size that matches the small whole ones so they cure evenly.
- VinegarSix quarts to three pounds of brown sugar gives a sharp sweet-sour syrup. Modern cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what to use; do not thin it with water, since the acid is doing the preserving.
- StorageThis is a crock pickle, not a canning recipe: there is no sealing or processing step here. Keep the finished pickles refrigerated and eat them within a few months, or follow a current tested boiling-water process if you want them shelf-stable.
Mixed pickles of this kind, cucumber and cauliflower and small onions bound together with mustard seed and turmeric, run straight back to English piccalilli, itself generally traced to eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian imitations of subcontinental achar. By the late nineteenth century American cookbooks were printing them under a shelf of names, chow-chow among them, and turmeric was a cheap, familiar pantry item. Such pickles belonged to supper, the light evening meal of cold meat, bread and preserves, where a jar of sharp sweet pickle was what made the plate worth sitting down to. A recipe this large also says something about the kitchen it came from, one with a cellar, a large jar to fill, and a garden that came in all at once.