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Pepper and Cabbage Relish
5 large green peppers I large red pepper I large solid head white cabbage 2 tablespoonfuls white mustard seed 2 tablespoonfuls salt 2 tablespoonfuls brown sugar Cold vinegar to cover Remove the stems and seeds from the carefully washed peppers; remove outside leaves and hard center from the cabbage and cut in pieces; chop the cabbage and peppers; add the other ingredients, mix thoroughly, and store in cans. This relish may be used at once, but if good vinegar is used, it will keep all winter. 2 dozen ears sweet corn I head cabbage 4 large onions 4 green peppers I red pepper 1 quart vinegar
This is a raw, uncooked vinegar relish sealed into jars and kept at room temperature through the winter, and that is where it fails by current standards. The notes below explain the problems and decode the older wording.
- No heat process at any stageNothing here is cooked, scalded or processed after filling. Vegetables go into the container raw and the jars are simply "stored," so nothing kills yeasts, moulds or spoilage bacteria carried in on the cabbage and peppers, and nothing drives air out to form a seal. A shelf-stable pickle needs either a measured boiling-water process or a formulation validated for refrigeration only.
- The acid is unmeasured"Cold vinegar to cover" is the whole preservation system, and it specifies neither strength nor volume. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household vinegar varied widely and was often homemade cider vinegar of unknown acidity; the author's own hedge, "if good vinegar is used," concedes that the recipe only works when the vinegar happens to be strong. Modern pickle recipes fix acidity at 5 percent and set a vinegar-to-vegetable ratio for that reason.
- Cabbage does not stay coveredChopped cabbage is buoyant and releases water as the salt draws on it. In an unprocessed jar the top of the pack can lift above the liquid, diluting the vinegar as it goes, and the exposed surface is where mould and yeast growth begins.
- Salt and sugar are far too low to helpTwo tablespoons of salt and two of sugar across five peppers and a whole head of cabbage is seasoning, not a preservative. This is not a brined or fermented kraut-style pack, so there is no salt concentration and no developed lactic acid doing any of the work.
- "Cans" means glass jarsIn books of this period "cans" and "canning" refer to glass preserving jars with a rubber ring and a screw band or wire bail, not to tinned metal. Nothing in the instruction indicates that the jars or lids were sterilised.
- White mustard seedThe white or yellow mustard seed called for is the mild round seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed. It is the standard seed in pickles and relishes; brown mustard seed is sharper and not interchangeable by volume.
- The stray ingredient listThe corn, cabbage, onions, peppers and quart of vinegar at the end appear to belong to a following recipe, presumably a corn relish. They are not part of this one, and no method for them survives on this page.
- If you want a pepper-cabbage relishUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength and a stated processing time, or treat any raw version as a refrigerator relish eaten within a week or two. Do not adapt the instructions above for keeping.
Pepper-and-cabbage relish belongs to the large family of American "chow chow" and pepper hash preparations that turned the end of the pepper crop and the winter cabbage into something sharp to eat beside plain meat and beans. Recipes of this kind cluster in Pennsylvania and Southern cookbooks under names like pepper hash, pepper relish and cabbage chowchow, and the raw uncooked version chcovered with cold vinegar since it needed no kettle time at all. Books published in the decades around 1900, when home canning was being promoted hard as domestic science and household economy, often print such recipes with exactly the confidence seen here: preservation is assumed to follow from vinegar and a tight jar, and the only quality control offered is that the vinegar be "good." The stray list of corn, onions and peppers trailing the text may be a typesetting overrun from the following recipe, though it is at least as likely an artefact of how the page was extracted.