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Cauliflower Pickles (Choose such as are fine)
Choose such as are fine and of full size, cut away al' the leaves, and pull away the flowers by bunches; soak ir brine that will float an egg for two days, drain, put in bottles with whole black pepper, allspice, and stick cinnamon; boil vinegar, and with it mix mustard smoothly, a little at a time and just thick enough to run into the jars, pour over the cold cauliflower and seal while hot. An equal quantity or less of small white cions, prepared as directed in recipe for onion pickles, may be added before the vinegar is poured over.
This is an open-kettle mustard pickle: hot vinegar poured over raw brined cauliflower and sealed, with no measured acid, no processing time and no temperature anywhere in the instructions. The reasons it fails are worth understanding, because several of them are specific to this particular style of pickle.
- No measured acidThe recipe never states how much vinegar, how strong, or in what ratio to the vegetables. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied in acetic acid strength and could fall below the 5 percent that modern pickling relies on. Without a known acid concentration there is no way to know whether the finished jars sit below pH 4.6, which is the line that keeps Clostridium botulinum from growing in a sealed low-oxygen jar.
- The mustard thickening is the specific problemVinegar is mixed with mustard until it is only just thin enough to run into the jars. A thickened, protein-rich liquid buffers acid, slows its diffusion into the dense cauliflower curd, and conducts heat badly. Modern canning guidance excludes thickened mixtures of this kind from safe home processing for exactly this reason: the interior of the vegetable pieces may never acidify or heat through.
- Sealing hot is not processing"Seal while hot" is open-kettle canning. The vegetables here are explicitly cold when the liquid goes over them, so the jar contents are unlikely to reach or hold any meaningful temperature, and the vacuum formed by cooling is not a substitute for a boiling-water bath. Current tested canning recipes specify a measured vinegar, a stated headspace and a timed process.
- Brine that will float an eggThis is the old test for a strong salt solution, conventionally around 10 percent salt by weight, which is the point at which a fresh egg floats. Two days in it draws water out of the curd and firms it, but salt at this strength inhibits rather than preserves once the vegetable is drained, and it plays no part in making the finished jars shelf-stable.
- "Cions"Almost certainly a garbled "onions", as the cross-reference to the onion pickle recipe confirms. "Al'" in the first line is likewise a broken "all"; both look like text damage rather than anything the writer intended.
- If you want the dishPickled cauliflower in a mustard vinegar is still made, and the flavour of this version is worth chasing. Use a current tested recipe with weighed salt, 5 percent vinegar and a timed water-bath process, or make it as a refrigerator pickle to be eaten within a few weeks.
Mustard-vinegar cauliflower belongs to the family of English "piccalilli" and mixed pickles that came into American kitchens through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks, where mustard flour did much of the work; the name is often said to derive from Indian-influenced pickles, though that account is traditional and disputed. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from church contributions, devotes an unusually long section to pickles because a cellar shelf of them was how a household kept a sharp, acid note on the table between one garden and the next. Cauliflower was a late-summer crop that would not hold in the root cellar the way cabbage or turnips did, so it went into brine and vinegar instead. The instruction to "choose such as are fine and of full size" leaves the judgment of quality to the reader.