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Celery Pickles
Put together in a porcelain-lined kettle two quarts chopped white cabbage, two quarts chopped celery, three quarts vinegar, half ounce each of crushed white ginger root and turmeric, fourth pound white mustard seed, two table-spoons salt, five of sugar; cook slowly several hours until cabbage and celery are tender.
This is a cooked chow-chow style pickle rather than a brined one: the vegetables soften in hot spiced vinegar and end up closer to a relish. A few of the ingredients and vessels need translating.
- Porcelain-lined kettleThat means an enamelled or otherwise non-reactive pan. Vinegar plus turmeric will pit bare aluminium or cast iron and pick up a metallic taste, so use enamelled cast iron or stainless steel.
- White ginger rootNineteenth-century "white ginger" was peeled, sometimes bleached, dried ginger sold in hard pieces. Half an ounce of dried ginger, cracked, is about 2 tablespoons; whole pieces tied in muslin are easier to fish out than crushed.
- TurmericHalf an ounce of ground turmeric is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. It is here for colour as much as flavour, and it will stain wooden spoons, plastic and grout permanently.
- Mustard seed by weightA quarter pound of white (yellow) mustard seed is roughly 2/3 cup. White mustard is the mild kind; brown or black seed will make the pickle noticeably hotter.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar in the 1870s was not standardised and varied in strength. Use ordinary 5 percent cider or white vinegar and do not dilute it, since the vinegar is what preserves the finished pickle.
- The cooking time"Several hours" will reduce cabbage and celery to a soft, jammy relish. If you want any texture left, 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering brings both to tender, and the flavour will still be fully spiced.
- Salt and sugarTwo tablespoons salt and five of sugar across seven quarts of ingredients is a light hand. Taste near the end of cooking and adjust; the sugar reads as balance, not sweetness.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 3 to 4 quarts, cooked down. The recipe gives no sealing or processing instructions at all, so pack it into clean jars, cool, and keep it refrigerated, where it will hold for a couple of months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested pickle-canning procedure for processing times.
Buckeye Cookery's pickle chapter belongs to the great age of American "chow-chow" and "mixed pickle," chopped-vegetable preserves flavoured with mustard seed and turmeric that gave a yellow, mustardy relish often said to descend from British piccalilli and, before that, from Anglo-Indian pickle-making, though the lineage — and the origin of the word "chow-chow" itself — is disputed; hence, on that traditional account, the ginger and turmeric in a recipe otherwise built on cabbage. Celery is the telling ingredient: it was still something of a market luxury in the 1870s, grown in trenched, blanched beds and sold in tall glass celery vases at table, so a pickle that stretched it with cabbage put a fashionable flavour within reach of an ordinary household.