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Variety Pickles
One peck each of green tomatoes and cucumbers, and one quart onions; pare, slice and salt (using a rounded half pint for all) each in separate jars, letting them stand in the salt twenty-four hours, and drain well, wringing and pressing in a cloth; sprinkle fresh green radish-pods and nasturtium seeds with salt, and let stand for the same length of time; boil in water salted to taste two quarts of half-grown, very tender bean pods, until they can be pierced with a silver fork, take out and drain. Now place each in a separate jar, cover with cold, weak vinegar for twenty-four hours, drain well, pressing hard to get out all the juice, cook tomatoes as in "Chopped Pickles," and then mix all well together. In a stone jar place first a layer of the mixture, sprinkle with mustard seed (prepared as directed in recipe for "Chopped Pickles)," horse-radish chopped fine, cinnamon bark, rings of garden peppers, and a few cloves, then another layer of the mixture, then the spice with a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper. The spices used for this amount are nine table-spoons stick cinnamon, four and a half tea-spoons each of mustard-seed, cloves, and horse-radish, and twenty-seven rings: of garden peppers. Cover with good cider vinegar, let stand over night, drain off vinegar, and boil in a porcelain kettle, adding brown sugar in the proportion of one pint to a gallon of vinegar;, skim well, pour hot over the pickles, continue to drain off and boil for several days. If not sweet enough, add more sugar,, although these are not intended for sweet pickles. The proportion of cucumbers may be double or even three times the quantity of tomatoes if desired. - Mrs. W. W. Woods.
This is a garden-clearing pickle built on the scale of a farm cellar, and the quantities are the first thing to deal with. Everything else is straightforward if you read it alongside the book's "Chopped Pickles," which this recipe leans on twice.
- A peck is a lotA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12-13 lb of green tomatoes or cucumbers. Two pecks plus a quart of onions and two quarts of bean pods will fill a 5-gallon crock. Quartering or eighthing the whole thing, spices included, is the sane approach for a modern kitchen.
- The salt measureA "rounded half pint" is a little over a cup of salt, divided among all the salted vegetables. Assume coarse pickling or kosher salt; table salt with anti-caking agents will cloud the brine.
- Two cross-references"Cook tomatoes as in Chopped Pickles" and the mustard seed "prepared as directed" both send you back to that recipe in the same section. Read it before starting or you will be stalled midway with drained vegetables on your hands.
- VesselsA "porcelain kettle" is enamelled cast iron or steel, and the point is non-reactive. The "silver fork" test is the same instinct. Vinegar and salt will pit bare cast iron, aluminium and copper, and pick up a metallic taste. Stone jar means a glazed stoneware crock; a food-grade plastic bucket or glass works.
- Radish pods and nasturtium seedsBoth are the green seed pods, gathered before they toughen: radish pods from bolted plants, nasturtium seeds pickled as the old English caper substitute. Neither is a supermarket item, so they come from your own garden or get left out. "Garden peppers" here are simply capsicums from the garden, sliced crosswise into rings; whether hot or mild is not specified, and cayenne is called for separately.
- Bean pods and cucumbersBoil the beans only until a fork slides in, which for half-grown tender pods is a few minutes, not the long boil the phrasing may suggest. If your cucumbers are waxed supermarket slicers, peel them; the paring instruction assumes thick-skinned field cucumbers.
- Vinegar strengthModern cider vinegar is standardised at 5 percent acidity, which the nineteenth-century "good cider vinegar" was not. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength. The "cold, weak vinegar" of the soaking stage is a separate, sacrificial batch that gets thrown out.
- The repeated boilingDraining off the vinegar and reboiling it over several days has the effect of drawing out vegetable water and concentrating the brine, which is presumably the point in a period before reliable sealing. Each cycle also cooks the vegetables softer. Two or three days is plenty for texture.
- StorageThe recipe ends with an open crock under vinegar, which is not how anything is kept now. Refrigerate the finished pickle and eat it within a couple of months, or use a current tested pickle recipe with a measured processing time if you want it shelf-stable. Yield, undivided, is several gallons.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Minneapolis in 1877 as a compilation of contributed recipes, many of them signed like this one, and its pickle chapter reads as a record of what a central Ohio garden produced all at once in late summer. A "variety pickle" is exactly what the name says: the last of everything, chopped and brined together, in the family of dishes that became chow-chow, piccalilli and end-of-garden relish. Green tomatoes appear because frost was coming and they would never ripen; radish pods and nasturtium seeds appear because both were commonly pickled in this period as a domestic stand-in for imported capers. The instruction to drain and reboil the vinegar for several days belongs to the era just before home canning was standardised, when a strong vinegar brine kept in a stone crock in a cool cellar did the preserving.