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India Relish (Two quarts cabbage one quart)
Two quarts cabbage, one quart green tomatoes, one quart cucumbers, three large onions, two green peppers, one red pepper; put all through the grinder, add one-half tablespoon allspice, one tablespoon white mustard seed, one tablespoon celery seed, one and one-half cups B sugar, one quart vinegar, two teaspoons salt; boil all together twenty minutes. Just before taking off mix one tablespoon of flour with one-half tablespoon of tumeric; let boil up once.
— Miss E. Joesbury
A mustard-and-turmeric pickle of the chow-chow family, thickened at the last minute with a flour slurry. The proportions are sound; only the vocabulary and the storage advice need updating.
- "B sugar"Almost certainly brown sugar, the usual reading in receipts of this period; the text does not distinguish light from dark. One and a half cups of brown sugar accounts for the relish's darker, molasses-edged sweetness against the turmeric.
- The grinderA hand-cranked meat grinder with a coarse plate. A food processor pulsed in short bursts gets close, but stop while the vegetables are still in distinct flecks — run it too long and you get a slurry that will not hold its texture through twenty minutes of boiling.
- Measure by volume, not by headMeasure by volume -- Two quarts of ground cabbage is roughly one medium to large head; a quart each of green tomatoes and cucumbers is on the order of a pound and a half to two pounds of each. The receipt gives the quantities before the grinding, so measure the prepared vegetables and then grind.
- No salting stepMany relishes of this type salt the ground vegetables and drain them overnight to pull out water. This one does not, so expect a looser, wetter result — which may be part of why the flour goes in at the end.
- The flour and turmericWhisk them into a few tablespoons of the hot liquid first to make a smooth paste, then stir that back in. Dumped in dry they clump, and turmeric lumps stay bitter and gritty.
- Vinegar strengthUse commercial cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Artisanal and homemade vinegars vary and are not reliable for pickling.
- StorageThe receipt gives no canning directions, and boiling in the kettle is not processing. Treat it as a refrigerator relish: pack hot into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled, using it within a couple of months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure rather than improvising one from this text.
- YieldA large batch: the raw vegetables and vinegar together come to well over a gallon, so expect several quarts of finished relish, depending on how much liquid cooks away.
"India relish" belongs to the large family of turmeric-yellow, mustard-seeded pickles — piccalilli, chow-chow, mustard pickle — often said to have been developed by English cooks in imitation of the spiced Indian achars encountered through the East India trade, and taken up in turn by American households in the nineteenth century. The name signals the seasoning, not the origin: allspice, mustard seed, celery seed and turmeric were the standard pantry spices of the period, and turmeric was valued at least as much for the color it gave as for its flavor. Recipes like this one exist because a kitchen garden yields green tomatoes and late cucumbers all at once before frost, and vinegar was the household's cheapest way of holding them. Its signature by Miss E. Joesbury is typical of the community cookbook: the contributor's name was the guarantee, and readers were expected to know what "B sugar" and "the grinder" meant without being told.