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Piccalilli
1/4 cup turmeric 1/4 cup black pepper seed I ounce celery seed pound mustard seed 3 red peppers, chopped fine pound ground mustard I cup olive oil 1 quart vinegar Chop the vegetables fine and dispose these in a porcelain dish in layers with salt between.
Let stand over night, then drain, discarding the liquid, wringing the vegetables in a cloth, if necessary. Heat the vinegar, sugar, seeds, turmeric, and the peppers to the boiling point, and pour over the vegetables. Let stand over night.
Then drain the liquid from the vegetables, reheat, and again pour over the vegetables.
Repeat this process the third morning. Then, when the mixture becomes cold, stir into it the ground mustard and curry powder, mixed with the olive oil and one quart of vinegar.
Piccalilli No. 2 1 quart green tomatoes 1 pint red tomatoes I head celery 2 red sweet peppers I sweet green pepper I large mild onion I ripe cucumber ½ cup salt 1 3 cups vinegar 1 pound brown sugar 1/2 teaspoonful mustard teaspoonful cayenne small head cabbage Chop the vegetables, cover with salt, and let stand over night. Drain and press in a cloth to remove all the liquid possible; add the vinegar, sugar, and spices and let simmer until clear (nearly an hour). Store hot in sterilized jars as canned fruit.
Piccalilli No. 3 Slice one peck of green tomatoes and six medium-sized onions. Sprinkle them with a cup and a half of salt and let stand over night.
Drain in a bag. Then turn the chopped mixture into a preserving kettle, cover with vinegar, and set over the fire. Add a scant teaspoonful of turmeric powder mixed with vinegar, one teaspoonful of cloves, two teaspoonfuls of cinnamon, two cups of sugar, and a red pepper chopped rather coarse. Mix thoroughly and cook until tender, stirring occasionally. Store in fruit jars as canned fruit. 100 small cucumbers 1 quart small onions 1 pint olive oil 1 ounce celery seed
Four piccalilli formulas run together here, and the printing has lost most of the fractions and at least two full ingredient lists. Read the whole page before shopping, because only Nos. 2 and 3 are complete enough to follow.
- No. 1 is unmakeable as printedThe spice and vinegar list survives but the vegetables it is meant to season have dropped out entirely, and curry powder appears in the method without ever being listed. The trailing fragment at the end of the page — 100 small cucumbers, a quart of small onions, a pint of olive oil, an ounce of celery seed — looks like the opening of a further recipe (the fourth on this page) whose remainder is missing, though the printed text does not allow certainty.
- Missing fractions"pound mustard seed" and "pound ground mustard" in No. 1, and "teaspoonful mustard" and "teaspoonful cayenne" in No. 2, have all lost their leading fraction. A pound of dry mustard against a quart of vinegar is not plausible; a quarter pound is. Treat these as genuinely unknown rather than guessing upward.
- A peck of green tomatoesIn No. 3 that is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of tomatoes. Cut the recipe in half unless you have a preserving kettle of real size; a peck of sliced tomatoes with six onions fills a 12-quart pot before it cooks down.
- Salt overnight, then wring hardThe overnight salting is the hinge of all these versions. It draws out the water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar and leave you with slack, soupy relish. Press or wring in a cloth until no more liquid comes; discard the brine rather than adding it back.
- Porcelain, not metal"A porcelain dish" means an unreactive vessel — glazed earthenware, enamelled iron, glass or stainless. Salt and vinegar together will pit bare aluminium and pull a metallic taste out of unlined copper. The "preserving kettle" of No. 3 should likewise be enamelled or stainless.
- The triple scald in No. 1Draining, reheating and re-pouring the spiced vinegar on three successive mornings drives acid and spice into the vegetables without ever cooking them, which helps them stay firm. The mustard, curry and oil go in only at the end, off the heat — the recipe says to wait until the mixture is cold — because dry mustard loses its pungency when boiled.
- Sealing the jars"Store hot in sterilized jars as canned fruit" is open-kettle canning, filling and capping straight from the pot with no further processing. It was standard practice when this book was written and has since been abandoned as unreliable for sealing. Follow a current tested procedure for water-bath processing pickles and relishes, and treat the uncooked oil-and-vinegar mixture of No. 1 as a refrigerator pickle to be eaten within a few weeks rather than shelf-stored.
- Yield and useNo. 2 gives roughly 4 to 5 pints; halved, No. 3 gives about the same. Piccalilli is a condiment served by the spoonful with cold meat, sausage, cheese or beans, so pint and half-pint jars make more sense than quarts.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens in the eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian pickle — early cookbooks spell it "paco-lilla" or "India pickle" — though the origin of the name is obscure, with suggestions ranging from a mangling of an Indian word to an English formation on "pickle". What stayed constant across the Atlantic was the yellow mustard-and-turmeric character; what changed was the vegetable. British piccalilli settled on cauliflower in a thick mustard sauce, while American versions like these three attached themselves to the green tomato, which every kitchen garden produced in quantity at the first frost and which was otherwise good for very little. That is why a preserving book of this era offers four variants in a row: piccalilli was less a fixed dish than a standing solution to the end-of-season problem of unripe fruit, and every household had its own proportions of sugar, vinegar and heat.