Home › Pickles › Spanish Pickles
Spanish Pickles
One dozen cucumbers, four heads of cabbage, one peck green tomatoes, one dozen onions, three ounces white mustard-seed, one ounce celery seed, one ounce turmeric, one box Coleman's mustard, two and a half pounds brown sugar. Let the cucumbers stand in brine that will float an egg three days; slice the onions, and chop cabbage and tomatoes, the day before making, and sprinkle with salt in the proportion of half pint to a peck. When ready to make, squeeze brine out of cucumbers, wipe them off, peel and cut them in slices, let all simmer slowly in a kettle together for half an hour, and then bottle. - Mrs. J. W. Grubbs, Richmond, Ind.
A chow-chow-style mixed pickle in the Indiana farmhouse manner, scaled for a cellar shelf rather than a refrigerator. The units and ingredients are worth understanding, but the preserving method as printed is not usable today.
- No vinegar is listedEvery element of this formula — mustard, turmeric, brown sugar, salted vegetables — belongs to a vinegar pickle, and the ingredient list omits it entirely. Whether the omission is a printer's error or an assumption that the cook would know, the result is a recipe with no stated acid, and therefore no way to judge whether the finished jars are acidified at all.
- Why that mattersCabbage, onions and green tomatoes are low-acid vegetables. Sealed into jars without measured acid and without a processing step, they are exactly the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. Salt and sugar at these levels do not prevent it.
- "Bottle" is not canningIn 1877 this meant ladling hot pickle into jars and sealing them, trusting the heat of the kettle. There is no processing time, no temperature and no headspace given. A current, tested pickle recipe with a measured vinegar-to-water ratio and a boiling-water-bath time should be used instead.
- A peckA dry peck is a quarter bushel, about 8 quarts — roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes. With four heads of cabbage and a dozen each of cucumbers and onions, the finished batch runs to several gallons.
- Brine that will float an eggThe old test for a strong brine, around 10 percent salt or better — enough that a fresh egg rises and shows a patch above the surface. It is a rough gauge and varies with the egg.
- Half pint of salt to a peckA volume measure of coarse pickling salt, roughly a cup, scattered over the chopped vegetables overnight to draw water. Modern table salt is denser and iodised, and does not substitute cup for cup.
- Coleman's mustardColman's of Norwich — the dry English mustard powder, still sold. A "box" of the period was a small tin, on the order of 2 to 4 ounces; the recipe does not say which.
- Turmeric by the ounceAn ounce of ground turmeric is about 4 tablespoons, used here for the yellow of a mustard pickle as much as for flavour. It was a standard grocer's spice in nineteenth-century America, sold beside the mustard seed.
Mixed mustard pickles of this kind — cucumber, cabbage, onion and green tomato bound with turmeric and mustard flour — travelled under a shifting set of names in American cookbooks: chow-chow, piccalilli, mustard pickle, and here "Spanish" pickles, a label with no evident Spanish connection; what it was meant to signify is unclear. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from contributions by named women across the Midwest, and Mrs. Grubbs of Richmond, Indiana is writing for a household using up green tomatoes at the end of the season. The scale is the tell: a peck of tomatoes and four heads of cabbage is a day's work and makes a batch large enough to keep as a winter condiment.