Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cauliflower, Pickled
Cauliflower, Pickled
This pickle should be made about the beginning of August. Choose firm, fresh, white heads, and let them be cut on a dry day. Pare away the leaves and the stem, and place the flowers for five minutes in boiling water, but do not let them boil up. Drain them, and cut them into convenient-sized pieces, and leave them on a sieve to dry. Half fill jars with the flowers, cover with cold vinegar in which spices have been boiled, allowing a quart of vinegar to two ounces of peppercorns, a salt-spoonful of cayenne, an ounce of ginger, and half an ounce of mace. Cover closely. Probable cost, 1s. per pint jar.
A cold-vinegar pickle of the plainest English sort, and the whole thing hinges on keeping water out: any moisture left on the florets dilutes the vinegar and invites spoilage.
- Dry the florets properlyAfter the five-minute scald, spread the pieces on a rack or towel and leave them until the surfaces are genuinely dry to the touch, an hour or more. Wet cauliflower thins the vinegar at exactly the point where acidity is doing all the preserving work.
- "Do not let them boil up"Pour boiling water over the flowers off the heat, or lower them into water just off the boil, and hold for five minutes. Boiling them properly cooks the curd and you get soft, grey pickle instead of crisp.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity (most malt, cider and distilled vinegars are) and do not dilute it. Anything weaker, or vinegar cut with water, will not hold this pickle.
- Cool the spiced vinegar completelyBoil the vinegar with the spices, then let it go cold before it meets the cauliflower. Hot vinegar softens the florets; the recipe's insistence on "cold vinegar" is the reason this pickle stays crunchy.
- MeasuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 fl oz, so about 5 US cups. A salt-spoonful is generally reckoned at a quarter teaspoon. The 2 oz of peppercorns is roughly half a cup and gives a fiercely peppery vinegar; the ounce of ginger is most likely whole dried root, bruised, rather than ground, and the half ounce of mace whole blades.
- Strain or leave the spicesCassell's does not say. Straining gives a clearer pickle that will not go on strengthening; leaving the spices in means the flavour keeps building for weeks. Either is traditional.
- Jars and lidsVinegar corrodes bare metal, so use glass jars with plastic-lined or glass lids. "Cover closely" means airtight, and the vinegar must stand above the vegetables at all times.
- Keeping and yieldThis is an unprocessed, refrigerator-style pickle: keep it cold, give it three to four weeks to mature, and use it within a few months. Two medium cauliflowers and a quart of vinegar fill roughly three or four pint jars.
Cauliflower was grown in English gardens from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, and was long treated as a delicate, short-season vegetable; the direction to make the pickle at the beginning of August, from firm heads cut on a dry day, fits that season. Cold spiced vinegar was a common Victorian treatment for firm vegetables, and cauliflower appears throughout nineteenth-century pickle chapters both on its own and in piccalilli and mixed pickle, where its bulk carried the mustard and turmeric. Cassell's gives a 'probable cost' for nearly every entry, here a shilling a pint jar, so that a household cook could compare it with a bought jar.