Home › The Principles of Cookery › Brocoli, to Pickle
Brocoli, to Pickle
Choose the finest, whitest, and closest vegetables before they are quite ripe. Pare off all green leaves and the outsides of the stalks. Parboil them in well-salted water. When drained and dry, pull off the branches in convenient-sized pieces, and put them into a jar of pickle prepared as for onions. Time to parboil, four or five minutes. Probable cost, from 2d. to 6d.
A spiced-vinegar pickle of the plainest Victorian kind, written on the assumption that you already have the onion-pickle recipe a few pages away. The gaps are all in the brine, so that is where the attention needs to go.
- What "brocoli" meant hereIn Victorian kitchens brocoli could mean several things, and often a firmer heading or sprouting type rather than the loose green calabrese on modern shelves; the instruction to pull off "the branches" suggests a branching head. Calabrese works, but the florets are softer and will not hold their bite as long; a firm white or purple sprouting head is likely nearer the original intent.
- "Before they are quite ripe"Meaning heads that are still tight and unopened, with no yellowing and no sign of the flower buds separating. Once the curd loosens the pickle goes soft and cloudy.
- The pickle prepared as for onionsThat cross-reference sends you to the book's spiced-vinegar recipe under onions; follow whatever spices it specifies rather than guessing. Use a vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity and cover the vegetables completely; anything left proud of the surface will spoil first.
- Parboil four or five minutesWith modern calabrese this is too long. Two to three minutes in fast-boiling salted water, then straight into iced water, gives florets that stay crisp. Firmer heading varieties can take the full five.
- Drained and dry mattersWater clinging to the florets dilutes the vinegar and is the usual cause of a pickle turning slack. Spread the pieces on a cloth for an hour or two, or overnight, before jarring.
- StorageThis is a keeping pickle in the sense that strong vinegar preserves it, but the recipe gives no processing at all. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle in clean jars, keep everything submerged, and use within a couple of months. Discard any jar that smells yeasty or shows cloudy sediment and bubbling.
- Yield and costCost -- "2d. to 6d." is a pre-decimal price for the vegetables at market, a reminder that this was cheap larder work rather than a delicacy.
Pickling was the ordinary Victorian answer to a glut, and this entry reads as part of a system rather than a self-contained recipe: the spiced vinegar is described in full under onions, and other vegetables are then sent back to it with a single line. Broccoli was grown in British gardens from Italian stock by the early eighteenth century and was sometimes called "Italian asparagus" or sprout-cauliflower; the heading forms grown in nineteenth-century kitchen gardens were closer to cauliflower than to the green calabrese that dominates today, which is why the instruction to look for the whitest and closest heads makes sense. A jar of pickles was a common accompaniment to cold meat and bread and cheese, and the few pence quoted for the raw vegetable indicates where such a dish sat in the household budget.