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NASTURTIUM SEEDS (a substitute for Capers)
The seeds of the nasturtium plant are excellent as a substitute for capers to be served with boiled mutton. Gather them while they are still young and green, wash them well in cold water, put a little salt with them well in cold water, put a little salt with them, and let them soak until next day. Dry them well with a soft cloth, put them into glass bottles, and cover them entirely with cold vinegar. Two ounces of salt, a dozen peppercorns, a small piece of horse-radish, four or five leaves of tarragon, and two cloves may be put with each quart of vinegar. Cork the bottles securely, and store them in a cool dry place. The nasturtium seeds will not be ready for use until the next summer. Probable cost, uncertain, nasturtium seeds being seldom offered for sale. (See also NASTURTIUM PICKLE.)
A straightforward cold vinegar pickle, and one of the few Victorian preserves that still works exactly as written. The only real requirements are young seeds and enough acid to keep them covered.
- The hinge: keep them submergedAnything sitting above the vinegar line will soften and spoil. Top the jars up as the seeds absorb liquid over the first week, and weight or pack them down so nothing floats.
- A printer's stumbleThe line "wash them well in cold water, put a little salt with them well in cold water" is a repeated phrase in the original setting. The intent is one wash, then an overnight soak in lightly salted cold water.
- Two salt figuresThe "little salt" is for the overnight soak; roughly a tablespoon per pint of water is enough. The 2 oz per quart belongs to the spiced vinegar and works out to something like three to four tablespoons of fine salt, which is on the heavy side by modern taste. Half that is plenty.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity; white wine, cider or malt all suit. Anything weaker, including homemade or "reduced acidity" vinegars, is not reliable for a room-temperature pickle.
- BottlesGlass bottles with corks were the standard containers of the period. Use clean screw-top jars with vinegar-proof lids instead; metal caps without a plastic liner will corrode and taint the pickle.
- Picking the seedsTake the green seed pods a few days after the flower drops, while they are still soft enough to dent with a fingernail. Older pods turn fibrous and never soften, however long they sit.
- The year's waitCassell's is conservative here. The seeds are pleasant after four to six weeks and better after three months; a full year mellows the pepperiness further but is not necessary. Keep them out of the light.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but a full quart of spiced vinegar is far more than most gardens produce seeds for in a season, so scale the spicing down proportionally rather than making a full quart.
The garden nasturtium, Tropaeolum majus, is a South American plant that reached European gardens by way of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and English cooks took to every part of it: leaves and flowers in salads, buds and green seeds in the pickle jar. Capers proper are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub that will not survive an English winter outdoors, so genuine capers were an import with an import's price. A plant that self-seeds in poor soil and hands over a peppery green substitute for nothing was an obvious economy, and Cassell's notes only that the seeds are "seldom offered for sale" — presumably, one may guess, because anybody with a garden already had them. The pairing with boiled mutton is the period's fixed idea: the sharp, salty pickle cuts the fat, and caper sauce for mutton appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward.