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Mixed Mustard Pickle
1 quart ripe cucumber in pieces 1 quart small green cucumbers 1 quart onions 1 quart green tomatoes I cauliflower 5 green peppers Cut all the above in pieces and put separately in weak salt and water for twenty-four hours.
Scald each separately in same water and drain.
This is the vegetable-preparation half of a mustard pickle, and the half that matters for safety — the mustard-and-vinegar dressing — never appears. What is printed cannot be finished or preserved as given.
- No acid, anywhereCucumber, onion, green tomato, cauliflower and pepper are all low-acid vegetables. The text specifies salt and water only, with no vinegar quantity and no strength, so nothing in it establishes the pH that keeps a sealed jar of vegetables safe from Clostridium botulinum.
- No processing instructionsThe recipe ends at "drain." There is no jar, no seal, no boiling-water bath, no time and no temperature. Use a current tested mustard pickle or piccalilli recipe instead.
- "Weak salt and water" is not a measurementPeriod recipes for this style vary widely in brine strength, and "weak" is nowhere defined here. A twenty-four-hour soak at an unknown concentration is a guess, not a cure, and salt in a soak of this kind generally works to draw out water and firm texture rather than to preserve.
- The missing dressingMixed mustard pickles of this era were commonly finished with a cooked sauce of dry mustard, turmeric, flour and vinegar poured hot over the drained vegetables. Without it this is simply salted, scalded produce.
- What a quart means hereThe quart is a volume of cut pieces, not a weight — roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of prepared cucumber or onion per quart. "I cauliflower" assumes a modest head broken into florets, around a pound trimmed.
- Scalding separatelyThe instruction to scald each vegetable on its own in the same water is sound reasoning: cauliflower and onion need longer than cucumber, and cooking them together turns the cucumber to mush. It is a texture step, not a sterilising one.
- ScaleFour measured quarts of vegetables plus a cauliflower and five peppers is a farmhouse batch, built for a household putting up a garden, not for a single jar.
Mixed mustard pickle is generally regarded as an American farmhouse relative of English piccalilli, a chopped-vegetable pickle in a turmeric-yellow mustard sauce whose name appears in British cookery by the mid-eighteenth century and is usually traced to imitations of Indian pickles and "India" condiments. Its logic is end-of-season logic: green tomatoes and undersized cucumbers that will never ripen, the last cauliflower, onions out of the ground all together, cut small and held in salt so the finished pickle stays crisp. Recipes like this circulated as personal contributions in community and commercial cookbooks alike, and were sometimes printed with a step or an entire dressing missing.