Chow Chow
One peck of green tomatoes, half peck string beans, quarter peck small white onions, quarter pint green and red peppers mixed, two large heads cabbage, four table-spoons white mustard seed, two of white or black cloves, two of celery seed, two of allspice, one small box yellow mustard, pound brown sugar, one ounce of turmeric; slice the tomatoes and let stand over night in brine that will bear an egg; then squeeze out brine, chop cabbage, onions and beans, chop tomatoes separately, mix with the spices, put all in porcelain kettle, cover with vinegar, and boil three hours.
A full-scale autumn preserving batch, sized for a cellar rather than a refrigerator. The quantities are dry measure and they are enormous, so scale before you shop.
- What a peck weighsA peck is 8 dry quarts: roughly 12-13 lb of green tomatoes, and a half peck of string beans is about 3.5-4 lb. A quarter peck of small white onions is about 3-3.5 lb. Quartering the whole recipe still gives a generous batch.
- A quarter pint of peppersThat is half a cup of chopped green and red peppers, seeded — a modest amount of colour and heat against twenty-odd pounds of vegetables, not the backbone of the dish.
- Brine that will bear an eggThe old test for a saturated-enough salt solution: add salt to cold water until a fresh egg floats with a coin-sized patch showing. That works out near 10 percent salt, about 1 lb of pickling salt per gallon. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt clouds the brine.
- One small box yellow mustardGround yellow mustard powder in a tin, about 2 oz. Turmeric at one ounce is roughly 4 tablespoons ground, and it is there for colour as much as flavour.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamel-lined pot. The point is a non-reactive surface — bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper will react with the vinegar, dull the turmeric and pick up a metallic taste. Stainless steel is the modern equivalent.
- Three hours is too longModern chow chow is simmered 30 to 45 minutes, until the vegetables are tender but still have bite. Three hours reduces green tomatoes and cabbage to a brown mush and drives off much of the vinegar's aroma. Cook until the syrup has thickened and the beans are just yielding.
- Vinegar strengthUse vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; nineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely, and the acid is what keeps the relish sound.
- Storing itThe recipe gives no processing instructions because it assumed a crock in a cold cellar. Refrigerate what you make and use it within a couple of months, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for jar sizes and times.
- YieldAs written, somewhere near 12 to 14 quarts — a winter's supply for a large household.
Chow chow is the catch-all pickle of the late-season garden: whatever is still on the vine when frost threatens, chiefly green tomatoes that will never ripen, chopped down and put up in spiced vinegar. The name is generally traced to the pidgin English of the China trade, where chow-chow meant a mixed or miscellaneous thing, and it attached itself to mixed pickles and preserved ginger arriving in American and British ports; the turmeric and mustard here point back to the same Anglo-Indian piccalilli family. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from Ohio housewives' contributions, and its pickle chapter reflects a household that preserved by the peck because it had to — this batch is a day's work in September that supplies relish for meat and beans until spring.