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Chow Chow Pickles
Let two hundred small cucumbers stand in salt and water closely covered for three days. Boil for fifteen minutes in half a gallon best cider vinegar, one ounce white mustard seed, one of black mustard seed, one of juniper berries, one of celery seed (tying each ounce separately in swiss bags), one handful small green peppers, two pounds sugar, a few small onions, and a piece alum half the size of a nutmeg; pour the vinegar while hot over the cucumbers, let stand a day, repeating the operation three or four mornings. Mix one-fourth pound mustard with the vinegar, pour over cucumbers, and seal up in bottles. - Mrs. Ada Estelle Bever.
This is a nineteenth-century sealed pickle, and the parts that make it work as a preserve are exactly the parts the recipe leaves unmeasured. The notes below explain the terms and then why the method falls outside current preserving practice.
- Why it fails as writtenThe safety of a vinegar pickle rests on measured acidity, and nothing here is measured in a way that can be checked: the salt-and-water strength is unstated, the cucumbers sit three days at room temperature, and half a gallon of vinegar is repeatedly drained off, reheated and returned, diluting further with cucumber juice each round. Use a current tested pickle recipe instead.
- "Seal up in bottles"There is no processing step at all — the jars are filled and closed, with no boiling-water bath, no stated headspace and no measurement of the finished acidity. A hot fill into a sealed bottle is not a preserving process by any modern standard.
- The vinegar-to-vegetable ratioTwo hundred cucumbers against two quarts of vinegar is a very thin liquor for that bulk, even before the repeated draining. Nineteenth-century cider vinegar also varied widely in strength; modern bottled vinegar is usually around 5 percent acidity, but the ratio here still leaves no margin.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard crisping agent of the period, added by eye — here "half the size of a nutmeg," roughly a teaspoon. It is no longer recommended for pickles; it contributes nothing to preservation and can leave a puckering, faintly bitter aftertaste.
- "Swiss bags"Small bags of fine muslin or cheesecloth, used to hold whole spices so they can be lifted out. An ounce of mustard seed is about three tablespoons; an ounce of celery seed slightly more, as it is lighter.
- Juniper berriesStill sold whole in the spice aisle, usually with gin in mind. An ounce is several tablespoons — a strongly resinous, piney note that dominates the mustard if left in long.
- "One-fourth pound mustard"Dry mustard powder, not prepared condiment mustard — close to a cup. Stirred into the vinegar at the end, it thickens the liquor and gives chow chow its cloudy yellow body.
- ScaleTwo hundred small cucumbers is a market-garden quantity, on the order of ten to fifteen pounds. A recipe of this size assumes a household putting up a winter's worth of pickle, not a few jars.
Chow chow reached American cookbooks by way of the British Indian and China trade — the name is generally traced to a pidgin term for mixed food or relish, and it appears in English pickle recipes before Buckeye Cookery was compiled in 1877. By the nineteenth century chow chow existed in American forms including the Pennsylvania style, a sweet-sour mix of many chopped vegetables, and the Southern style, built on green tomatoes and cabbage. Mrs. Bever's differs from both — small whole cucumbers under mustard, with juniper and celery seed for aromatics. Repeated draining, reheating and pouring back of the vinegar over several mornings appears in other pickle recipes of the period.