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India Relish
3 sweet red peppers 2½ pounds citron melon or watermelon rind 2 heads white cabbage, small but heavy 5 Spanish onions 2 cups brown sugar 1 tablespoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls ground cinnamon 2 teaspoonfuls ground mace 2 teaspoonfuls paprika 2 teaspoonfuls mustard 2 tablespoonfuls white mustard seed 1 tablespoonful curry powder 1 tablespoonful celery seed 1 quart vinegar Remove the green rind from the melon, and if watermelon is used, discard all the soft portion; cut into strips or cubes. Cover with brine made of one fourth a cup of salt and water to cover, and let stand over night; then rinse in cold water, drain, dry on a cloth, and chop fine. Chop fine the peppers, cabbage, and onions, sprinkle with half a cup of salt, and let stand over night; then drain in a colander and squeeze in a cloth to remove all the liquid possible. Mix the two chopped preparations with the other ingredients and let boil nearly one hour. Store hot in sterilized jars as canned fruit.
A vinegar pickle in the Anglo-Indian mould, heavy on the salting and the spice box. The technique is sound; only the packing method and a couple of the ingredients need translating.
- Citron melonCitron melon is a hard, white-fleshed preserving melon, once grown specifically for pickles and candied peel and now rare outside seed catalogues and Southern gardens. Watermelon rind, the recipe's own alternative, is the practical substitute: use the firm white layer only, with all green skin pared and every trace of pink flesh cut away, or the relish goes mushy.
- "2 teaspoonfuls mustard"This means dry ground mustard, distinct from the whole white mustard seed listed separately two lines down. White mustard seed is what is sold today as yellow mustard seed.
- Spanish onionsLarge mild yellow onions. Five of them is a great deal — roughly 3 to 4 pounds — which is in scale with two cabbages, so do not scale them down thinking the count is small.
- Vinegar strengthA quart of cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what makes this keep. Do not substitute wine vinegars of unstated strength, and do not dilute with water to soften the sharpness; the acid is the preservative.
- The two saltingsThe melon rind gets a brine overnight, the cabbage, peppers and onions a dry salting. Both exist to draw water out so the finished relish is not soupy. The squeezing in a cloth is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides the texture.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less resinous than nutmeg itself. Two teaspoons ground is a firm hand; if your jar has been open a year it will taste of nothing, so buy fresh.
- "Boil nearly one hour"An hour at a bare simmer, stirred often, is right for this quantity — it cooks down the onion and marries the spices. Watch the bottom of the pot: with 2 cups of brown sugar in it, the mixture scorches easily once it thickens.
- Packing"Store hot in sterilized jars" is open-kettle canning, standard practice when this was written and no longer recommended even for high-acid pickles because the seal is unverified. Current practice is to fill hot jars, leave half an inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath; follow a present-day guide for the timing at your altitude.
- Yield and keepingExpect somewhere around 6 to 8 pints from this quantity, depending on how hard you squeezed the vegetables. Like all mustard-and-curry pickles it is harsh for the first fortnight and considerably better after a month.
"India relish" belongs to the long line of Anglo-Indian pickles — piccalilli and its many cousins, and arguably chow-chow, whose ancestry is disputed — that British and American cooks built out of cabbage, onion and green fruit once commercial curry powder, on sale in Britain from the late eighteenth century, had become a grocery staple. The name signals the spicing rather than any Indian original: turmeric-yellow curry powder, mustard, mace and cinnamon over vegetables that are entirely of the northern kitchen garden. The use of melon rind is telling of the period's economy; watermelon rind and citron melon were preserved, candied and pickled precisely because throwing away edible bulk was not done. A book of this kind, aimed at the household putting up its own winter stores, would be expected to carry at least one relish of this type alongside the chili sauces and the mixed mustard pickles.