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Piccalilli
Piccalilli may be made of almost all kinds of vegetables that are used for pickling--cauliflowers, white cabbages, French beans, capsicums, gherkins, large and small onions, cucumbers, radish pods, green tomatoes, and nasturtiums. Take equal quantities of each kind. Prepare them by slicing the large sorts, shredding the cabbage, and pulling the cauliflower into small pieces. Put them into a large pan with boiling brine sufficiently strong to bear an egg. Let them simmer for one minute, then drain the liquid from them, spread them out on large dishes, and place them in the sun until they are perfectly dry. Prepare as much pickle as will entirely cover the vegetables, in the following proportions. Boil two quarts of good vinegar with two ounces of bruised ginger, one ounce of whole white pepper, one ounce of allspice, two ounces of curry-powder, and two ounces of shallots. Boil these for five minutes, then mix two ounces of best mustard smoothly with a little boiling vinegar, and stir it into the rest of the vinegar, which must not boil after the mustard is added. Let the first heat go off, then pour the vinegar over the vegetables, and when they are quite cold store them in jars, and intermix the spices amongst them. Be careful that the vegetables are covered with the vinegar, and cover the jar with bladder to exclude the air. This pickle must be examined at intervals, and as the vegetables absorb the vinegar, fresh cold vinegar must be added and well stirred in. Additions of various vegetables may be made as they come into season; but it should be remembered that they must be scalded in brine and dried, then scalded in hot vinegar, and allowed to grow cold, before they are put to the rest of the pickle, or they will not keep.
A late-Victorian mixed pickle in the Anglo-Indian manner, built on a salt cure, a sun-dry, and a spiced mustard vinegar. Most of it translates directly; the drying stage and the storage vessel are the parts that need rethinking.
- Do not boil the mustardThis is the hinge of the recipe, and the text says so: once the mustard is stirred in, the vinegar must not return to a boil. Heat drives off the volatile compounds that give mustard its pungency and leaves a flat, faintly bitter sauce.
- Brine "strong enough to bear an egg"A heavily salted brine. A raw egg begins to float at around 10 per cent salt, so from about 100 g of salt per litre of water upwards; the test is approximate rather than exact. Float a raw egg in it, as the book intends, and add salt until the egg no longer sinks.
- The one-minute simmerGenuinely one minute. The point is to shock the vegetables and start the salt penetrating, not to cook them; cauliflower and beans held longer collapse and the finished pickle turns soft.
- Instead of drying in the sunOpen-air sun drying on dishes is slow, uncontrolled and invites flies and dust. Drain the vegetables well, spread them on racks or towels, and leave them in front of a fan for a few hours, or in an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, until the surfaces are dry to the touch and no longer weeping.
- "Best mustard"Dry English mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Two ounces is about 60 g, slaked with a little hot vinegar to a smooth paste before it goes into the pan.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled at least 5 per cent acetic acid. Period vinegar strengths varied, and diluting the acid is what lets a mixed pickle spoil.
- Bladder, and what to use nowA pig's bladder tied wet over the jar mouth shrank as it dried and sealed the pickle. Use glass jars with vinegar-proof plastic-lined lids; bare metal corrodes and taints the pickle brown.
- StorageThese jars were kept cool and dark and topped up with fresh cold vinegar as the vegetables drank it in, exactly as the text instructs. Refrigerate after opening, keep everything submerged, and discard any jar that smells yeasty or shows fuzzy growth rather than trying to rescue it.
Piccalilli appears in English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century, where such mixtures are often called "Indian pickle" in imitation of the mango and mixed pickles brought back from India; the name's origin is obscure, and the derivation from a fanciful play on "pickle" is a suggestion rather than an established fact. The two ounces of ready-made curry powder point to a commercially blended spice mix, which grocers had sold since the late eighteenth century and which served as shorthand for the flavour of the East. The recipe reads as a framework rather than a fixed formula, telling the cook to add vegetables "as they come into season" -- a running store of acid and salt for the garden's surplus in a house without refrigeration. American versions are commonly sweeter and lean on green tomatoes, while the British form kept the mustard and the yellow colour it gives.