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Cauliflower Pickles (To twelve heads of cauliflower)
To twelve heads of cauliflower, five quarts of vinegar, five cups brown sugar, six eggs, one bottle French mustard, two tablespoonfuls ginger, a few garlic, two green peppers, one-half teaspoonful cayenne, butter size of an egg, one ounce pulverized turmeric. Beat well together the eggs, sugar, mustard, ginger, and turmeric, then boil in vinegar, with garlic and peppers, ten minutes. Boil cauliflower in salt water until tender, then place carefully in jar, pour over the boiling hot mixture. - Mrs. W. W. Eastman, Minneapolis.
A mustard-and-turmeric sweet pickle of the piccalilli family, scaled for a cellar full of jars. The reason it cannot be followed today is the egg-thickened dressing combined with open-kettle jarring and no processing step at all.
- Why this one failsSix beaten eggs go into the pickling liquid as a thickener, and the finished jars are simply filled with boiling mixture and left to seal themselves. That is open-kettle canning: no sterilised lids, no boiling-water bath, no measured process time, and no way to know the jars ever sealed. Nothing in the recipe brings the sealed contents to a verified temperature.
- The eggs and the acidityEgg and butter dilute and buffer the vinegar, and the added solids of the dressing make the effective acidity of the liquid surrounding the cauliflower impossible to know. A pickle intended for months of shelf storage has to have a reliably high acid level throughout, and an egg-enriched dressing of unknown strength does not give you that. Modern preserving guidance does not include egg-thickened dressings among tested shelf-stable pickles; such dressings are generally kept refrigerated and used within a short time.
- The vegetable is also a problemCauliflower boiled in salt water until tender is soft, low-acid and porous. Hot liquid poured over it does not sterilise the interior of the florets, and the pieces will not acidify evenly through the mass in a large jar.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength and could fall below the 5 percent acetic acid that tested recipes assume. The original gives no way to check it, which is exactly the missing measurement that makes the method unusable.
- Ambiguities you cannot resolve"One bottle French mustard" refers to a commercial bottled prepared mustard of the 1870s and has no fixed volume; "a few garlic" is unquantified; "two green peppers" gives no size. Even setting safety aside, the seasoning cannot be reproduced with any confidence.
- If you want the flavourUse a current tested recipe for pickled cauliflower or mustard pickle from a reliable preserving source, which will specify vinegar strength, jar size and processing time.
- Reading the old measures anyway"Butter size of an egg" is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. An ounce of pulverized turmeric is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of ground turmeric, used here for colour as much as flavour. Twelve heads of cauliflower and five quarts of vinegar point to a large single batch.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from contributions signed with the names and towns of the women who sent them in, and this one carries Mrs. W. W. Eastman of Minneapolis. The book's pickle chapter includes a number of sweet pickles -- the sugared, spiced, mustard-yellow relishes that were a common feature of American tables in the last quarter of the century and were expected to cut through plain boiled and roasted meat. The turmeric here does the work it does in piccalilli and chow-chow, staining everything the familiar mustard yellow, and the bottled "French mustard" indicates that manufactured condiments were available to home preservers by the 1870s. The scale -- twelve heads at once -- suggests a household putting up a large batch rather than making a jar for the week.