Piccalille
One large white cabbage, fifty small cucumbers, five quarts small string-beans, eight small carrots, one dozen sticks celery, five red peppers, three green peppers, two heads cauliflower; chop fine, soak over night in salt and water, wash well, drain thoroughly, and pour over them hot vinegar spiced with mace, cinnamon and allspice; turn off vinegar and scald until safe to leave like common pickles; or seal in can while hot. - Mrs. W. L.
This is a full-scale nineteenth-century mixed pickle, made in the quantities a family put down for a winter. The vegetable work is sound, but the preserving method at the end of the recipe is one that food-safety authorities abandoned long ago, and the recipe cannot be followed as printed.
- No measured vinegar, no known acidityThe recipe never says how much vinegar, of what strength, or in what ratio to the vegetables. Safe pickling of a mixed low-acid load depends on the finished brine holding enough acetic acid throughout; "pour over them hot vinegar" gives no way to know whether it does. Nineteenth-century household vinegar also varied widely in strength, unlike today's standardised 5 percent.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal in can while hot" is open-kettle canning: hot food into a jar, lid on, no processing in a boiling-water bath. It is no longer accepted for any product. The headspace and the underside of the lid are never brought to temperature, and the seal itself is unreliable.
- Low-acid vegetablesString beans, carrots, cauliflower, celery and cabbage are all low-acid. Beans and carrots in particular are classic vehicles for Clostridium botulinum when sealed anaerobically without either verified acidification or pressure processing. The toxin leaves no smell, taste or visible sign.
- "Scald until safe to leave"This is the whole preservation step, and it specifies neither a temperature nor a duration nor how many times to repeat it. It relies on the cook's judgment of a hazard that cannot be judged by eye. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority instead.
- On the overnight saltingThe soak in salt and water is the one part of the method modern practice still endorses in principle: it draws water out of the vegetables so the brine is not diluted. The original gives no salt proportion, which is another reason the recipe cannot simply be scaled down and followed.
- ScaleFifty cucumbers, five quarts of beans, two cauliflowers and a large cabbage adds up to several gallons of finished pickle. This was intended for a cellar shelf, not a single jar.
- Spellings and spices"Piccalille" is one of many nineteenth-century spellings of piccalilli. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or in blades; whole spices were often tied in cloth to keep the brine clear, though this recipe does not say so.
Piccalilli reached English and American kitchens from the Anglo-Indian pickle trade, and the name is generally traced to a corruption of "pickle" with an Indian-sounding ending, appearing in British sources from the mid-eighteenth century onward. The version seen here is a clear spiced-vinegar mixed pickle, which relies on mace, cinnamon and allspice rather than mustard for its character. Buckeye Cookery (1877) carries a long pickle chapter, and the contributor initials -- "Mrs. W. L." -- mark this as one of the reader-submitted recipes the compilers gathered. The vagueness of the final instruction is typical of the era: commercial canning was industrialising rapidly in the 1870s, but home preserving was still taught as a matter of experience rather than measurement, and the science of botulism in home-canned vegetables was decades away.