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Mixed Pickles
1 quart small white onions 6 large red peppers 1 quart small cucumbers 1 quart sliced green tomatoes 3 tablespoonfuls white mustard seed 1 tablespoonful cloves 1 teaspoonful celery seed
What survives here is a shopping list, not a procedure: there is no vinegar, no salt, no brining time, no cooking and no processing instruction. Read it as a record of what went into a turn-of-the-century jar of mixed pickles rather than as something to follow.
- The method is missing entirelyEvery step that makes a pickle safe — the salt cure, the vinegar, the heating, the sealing — is absent from the text as printed. Any attempt to fill those gaps from memory is guesswork with a low-acid vegetable mix in a sealed jar, which is the exact combination that carries botulism risk.
- No vinegar, no acid, no safetyOnions, cucumbers, peppers and green tomatoes are all low-acid. Their safety in a jar depends wholly on an acidifying brine of known strength; modern practice calls for vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid in a measured ratio. Nothing here specifies that, so nothing here can be judged safe.
- No processing time or temperatureContemporary books frequently assumed the reader would simply pour hot spiced vinegar over the vegetables and cork the jar. Current guidance requires a boiling-water bath of a stated length for the jar size and altitude. Use a current tested pickle recipe if you want to put up mixed pickles.
- "A quart" of vegetablesThe quart here is a volume measure of whole trimmed vegetables, not a weight — roughly a quart jar's worth of peeled small onions or gherkin cucumbers. It is an inherently loose measure and one reason the proportions cannot be reconstructed with confidence.
- Small white onionsThese are what a supermarket now sells as pearl or boiling onions, an inch or so across.
- Whole spicesWhite mustard seed is the pale yellow seed, milder than brown; the tablespoonful of cloves is presumably whole cloves, which stain the brine dark and dominate quickly. Whole spices were generally preferred for pickling, ground spice being both weaker with keeping and easier to adulterate.
- Green tomatoesSliced unripe tomatoes were a standard pickle component when a frost meant clearing the vines. They contribute firmness and tartness, though not enough acidity to make the mixture safe on their own.
Mixed pickles belong to the great late-summer clear-out of the kitchen garden, when whatever was left on the vines — small onions, gherkin cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes that would never ripen — went into a crock together with spices. The English tradition of mixed pickle, and its relative piccalilli, is often linked to the eighteenth-century taste for Indian-style pickles and achars, which may be one reason mustard seed and cloves persist in recipes like this one; the origins of chow-chow are disputed. Books of this type assumed a reader who already knew how to salt, drain and scald; the printed page was a proportion list and a spice guide, with the technique carried in the household rather than on the page. That assumption is exactly what makes such entries unusable now, and standardized, tested canning directions — with stated acid strength and processing time — spread through government and extension publications over the following decades.