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Dressing for Mixed Mustard Pickle
6 tablespoonfuls white mustard seed 1 tablespoonful turmeric 1 tablespoonful ground mustard 4 tablespoonfuls celery seed 1½ cups sugar 1 cup flour 2 quarts vinegar Scald the vinegar; mix together the ground mustard, turmeric, sugar, and flour, and stir into the hot vinegar; continue to stir until the mixture thickens; set the dish in boiling water, cover, and let cook fifteen or twenty minutes; add the seeds and pour, hot, over the prepared vegetables.
Small White Onions, Pickled Wash the onions and cover them with lukewarm water; when quite cool, take off the skins with a silver knife. Rinse in cold water, then drain and cover with vinegar, scalding hot; let boil five or six minutes in the vinegar; skim into cans; add tarragon leaves and bits of horseradish; pour on the same or a fresh supply of vinegar, scalding hot, and store in jars, as canned food.
This is two procedures run together: a thickened mustard sauce poured over prepared vegetables, and a separate method for pickled onions. Both end in sealed jars with no processing step, and the sauce is the part that puts the whole preserve outside current safe-canning practice.
- Flour in a canned pickleThe dressing is thickened with a full cup of flour. Starch-thickened brines are excluded from tested home-canning procedures: the paste slows heat penetration to the centre of the jar, so nothing reaches a reliable temperature, and it dilutes the acid that is supposed to be doing the preserving. Where a modern tested recipe calls for a thickener in a mustard pickle, it is generally added at serving time rather than before sealing.
- Unknown acidity"2 quarts vinegar" gives no strength. Household vinegar of this period was not standardised in the way tested recipes now assume, and homemade cider vinegar in particular could fall below the 5 percent acetic acid such recipes require. Once a cup and a half of sugar and a cup of flour are stirred in, the finished pH of the dressing is unknown.
- No processing, no seal you can trust"Store in jars, as canned food" is open-kettle canning: hot contents into hot jars, lid on, done. It was standard for decades and is no longer considered adequate, because the headspace and lid are never heated enough to sterilise and the vacuum that forms is unreliable. Current practice for pickles is a measured boiling-water process.
- The onions are the safer half, and still not safe hereOnions boiled five or six minutes in scalding vinegar and packed hot are a genuinely high-acid preserve. The failure is the same lack of a timed process and unknown vinegar strength, plus horseradish and tarragon added raw to the jar after the vinegar has done its work.
- Silver knifeThe instruction to peel with a silver knife is a survival from the era of carbon-steel blades, which stained and left a metallic taste on light-coloured vegetables. Stainless steel made the rule obsolete; it is not a safety point.
- If you want mixed mustard pickleUse a current tested recipe from a reliable preserving authority, which will specify vinegar acidity, jar size and a processing time. The flavour profile here — white mustard seed, celery seed, turmeric — is easy to match.
Mixed mustard pickle is the American branch of English piccalilli, itself an eighteenth-century attempt at the Indian-style pickles arriving through the East India trade; turmeric supplies the yellow that gave the family its nickname of "yellow pickle," and mustard, vinegar and sugar do the rest. By the time domestic-science writers were compiling books like this one, the dish was often made in late summer, with vegetables such as cauliflower, small onions, green tomatoes and cucumbers salted overnight, then bound in a mustard sauce stiffened with flour so it would cling. The dressing is published here as a separate entry, to be poured over whatever "prepared vegetables" the garden had produced. The open-kettle sealing described at the end was the ordinary household method of the day; laboratory work on heat penetration and jar sealing over the following decades is what replaced it with timed water-bath processing.","removed":"Removed the claim of a 'fixed' late-summer routine (softened to 'often') and the unsupported generalisation that separately published dressings were characteristic of period preserving manuals treating brine as recipe and vegetables as variable."}Removed the claim of a 'fixed' late-summer routine (softened to 'often') and the unsupported generalisation that separately published dressings were characteristic of period preserving manuals treating brine as recipe and vegetables as variable.**REPAIRED PARAGRAPH**: Mixed mustard pickle is the American branch of English piccalilli, itself an eighteenth-century attempt at the Indian-style pickles arriving through the East India trade; turmeric supplies the yellow that gave the family its nickname of