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Mustard Pickles (Two quarts of small cucumbers)
Two quarts of small cucumbers, one quart of small onions, one quart of green tomatoes, one large cauliflower, six green peppers; put all in a large jar, and pour over them a weak brine; let it stand twenty-four hours, then scald in same water, and drain. Make a paste of six tablespoons of ground mustard, one tablespoon of tumeric, one and one-half cups of sugar, one small cup of flour and two quarts of cider vinegar; mix dry ingredients thoroughly, add the vinegar, and boil a few minutes, being careful not to burn. Pour over the pickles.
— Mrs. Gilbert L. Jones
A classic mustard pickle — what most nineteenth-century American cooks called chow-chow. The proportions are sound; what the receipt leaves out is any guidance on storage, which is where modern practice diverges sharply.
- Storage, firstThere is no canning step here: the hot dressing is simply poured over the drained vegetables. Treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and keep it cold, eating it within a couple of months. Flour-thickened pickles are not recommended for boiling-water canning, because the starch insulates the interior and keeps it from heating evenly; if you want shelf-stable jars, work from a current tested recipe instead.
- "A weak brine"Unspecified, as it usually is in these books. The intent is a light salting to draw water out of the vegetables, not a cure — roughly 1/2 cup of pickling salt per gallon of water is in the historical range. Use non-iodized salt so the brine stays clear.
- "Scald in same water"Bring the vegetables up in their own brine just until the cucumbers lose their raw opacity, two or three minutes, then drain well. Boiling them soft here gives limp pickles, since they will sit in hot dressing afterward.
- Cutting the vegetablesCucumbers meant to be left whole should be gherkin-sized, an inch or two; anything larger wants to be cut in chunks. Break the cauliflower into small florets and quarter the onions if they are not pearl onions.
- The dressingWhisk the mustard, turmeric (spelled "tumeric" here), sugar and flour together completely dry before any vinegar goes in — that is the whole trick to a lump-free sauce. Add the vinegar gradually, and stir constantly over moderate heat; a flour-thickened acid mixture scorches quickly.
- Vinegar strengthUse cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, the standard on supermarket shelves. Older homemade cider vinegar varied in strength, so the acidity of the original would not have been predictable.
- Ground mustardSix tablespoons of dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Its heat is volatile and fades over weeks in the jar, so the pickle mellows noticeably by the second month.
- YieldA large batch: four quarts of measured vegetables plus a cauliflower and six peppers, dressed with two quarts of vinegar. Expect somewhere in the region of six quarts of finished pickle. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd or giving jars away.
Mustard pickles of this kind descend from English piccalilli, whose name is often said to be a corruption of "pickle" filtered through eighteenth-century enthusiasm for Indian-style spiced preserves; the turmeric that gives the sauce its yellow is the surviving marker of that ancestry. By the late nineteenth century the mixed mustard pickle had become thoroughly domestic in the American Northeast, a way of using the tag ends of the kitchen garden — the cutting cucumbers too small to slice, the tomatoes that would never ripen before frost, a single head of cauliflower — in one crock. That it appears with a contributor's name attached is characteristic of community cookbooks of the period, in which each dish stood as a small piece of local reputation.