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Corn Relish
2 dozen ears sweet corn. 1 head cabbage. 4 large onions. 4 green peppers. 1 red pepper. 1 quart vinegar. 3/4 cup flour. 1 quart vinegar. 3 cups sugar cup flour ½ cup salt ¼ cup dry mustard 1 teaspoonful turmeric I quart vinegar Cut the corn from the ears; chop the other vegetables fine, first discarding the seeds of the peppers; add one quart of the vinegar to the corn and chopped vegetables and set to boil; mix together the seasonings and flour, gradually add the other quart of vinegar (cold), and stir into the hot vegetables. Let boil half an hour.
Store in cans.
This entry has come down to us damaged: the ingredient list is missing the corn, the vegetables, and most of the quantities, and the method calls for two quarts of vinegar where only one is listed. Beyond the transcription problems, the preserving instruction is the sort that current canning practice has abandoned outright.
- Why this one is unsafe"Store in cans" is open-kettle canning: hot relish ladled into jars and sealed, with no processing in a boiling-water bath afterward. The jars are not held at a temperature that destroys spoilage organisms in the headspace or on the rim, and the seal cannot be verified. Modern relish recipes are filled hot and then processed for a measured time.
- The acidity cannot be checkedSafety in a canned relish depends on the finished product being reliably acidic, which in turn depends on the ratio of vinegar to vegetables. This text names only corn and peppers and leaves "the other vegetables" unspecified, with no weights at all, so that ratio is unknowable. Corn is a low-acid vegetable, and under-acidified canned corn is a documented vehicle for Clostridium botulinum, which produces no smell or bubble to warn you.
- The vinegar strength is unstatedNineteenth- and early twentieth-century household vinegar varied widely in strength, and many cooks used homemade cider vinegar of unknown acetic acid content. Current practice specifies 5 percent acidity precisely because the older assumption no longer holds.
- The flour is the other problemFlour thickens the relish, and thickened, starchy contents conduct heat poorly. Even a properly timed water-bath process is calculated for thin, freely circulating liquid; flour-bound mixtures were removed from tested canning recipes for exactly this reason. How much flour was intended here cannot be recovered, since that is the one quantity the list omits.
- A cup, a spoonfulThe measure before "cup flour" is absent in the printed recipe, so no conversion can be offered for it; the vinegar and turmeric quantities were checked and read as our text now gives them. The recipe calls for two quarts of vinegar in all, one boiled with the vegetables and one added cold with the flour and seasonings.
- If you want corn relishUse a current tested recipe from an extension service or a modern preserving book, which will give weights for the vegetables, a stated vinegar acidity, and a processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Corn relish belongs to the large family of mustard-and-turmeric pickles related to English piccalilli, and it became a common feature of American preserving cupboards where sweet corn was cheap and abundant in late summer. The formula is fairly stable across old cookbooks: sweet corn, cabbage, onion and sweet peppers, bound with sugar, dry mustard and turmeric in vinegar, the turmeric contributing colour as well as flavour. Home canning was widely promoted as both thrift and patriotism in the early twentieth century, and glass jars with rubber rings and screw bands had made putting up vegetables a domestic routine rather than a specialist craft. What such books generally lacked, and what later food-safety research supplied, was any notion of processing time, jar temperature or measured acidity -- which is why an instruction as brief as "store in cans" was once considered sufficient direction.