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Mustard Pickles (One quart onions one quart)
One quart onions, one quart cucumbers, one quart green tomatoes sliced, two large cauliflowers, three red peppers, six green peppers; put in salt water over night, drain, then scald in vinegar and water.
Mustard Sauce - Three-quarters pound mustard, one and onehalf cups brown sugar, one-half cup of flour mixed in cold vinegar, two quarts vinegar brought to boil, then stir in the other ingredients; let boil a few minutes and pour over pickles.
A classic end-of-garden mustard pickle, close kin to piccalilli and chow-chow. The vegetable list is generous but the sauce quantities are the part that needs translating.
- The mustardThree-quarters of a pound means dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. That is roughly three cups by volume, which makes a fiercely hot, deep-yellow sauce; reduce it if you want something milder.
- Brine strength is not given"Salt water over night" is left to the cook. A working overnight brine is about a cup of pickling salt to a gallon of water, enough to draw water out of the vegetables and keep them crisp. Use non-iodised salt; iodine and anti-caking agents cloud the finished pickle.
- VinegarHousehold vinegar of this era varied in strength. Use commercial cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is what modern pickling assumes, and do not dilute it beyond the water called for in the scalding step.
- Scald, do not cookThe vegetables go into the vinegar-and-water only long enough to heat through, two or three minutes. Cauliflower and cucumber turn to mush quickly, and the whole point of a mustard pickle is the snap.
- Thickening the sauceThe half cup of flour must be slurried smooth in cold vinegar before it meets the boiling pot, exactly as written, or it will lump beyond rescue. Boil the finished sauce a full two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Peppers"Three red peppers, six green peppers" most likely means sweet bell-type peppers, red simply being ripe green, though hot peppers cannot be ruled out. Read as chillies, the result would be a much hotter pickle.
- StorageThis is written as a crock pickle, not a canning recipe: there is no jar processing and no sealing step. Pack into clean jars, refrigerate, and use within a couple of months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested recipe with specified processing times.
- YieldThe onions, cucumbers and tomatoes alone come to three quarts, and two large cauliflowers plus nine peppers add several quarts more, with better than two quarts of sauce on top. This is a large batch; expect well over a gallon of finished pickle, and halve the recipe if that is more than you want.
Mustard pickle belongs to the family of English piccalilli that crossed the Atlantic and settled in American kitchens as chow-chow and "mixed pickle" — chopped hard vegetables held in a thickened, mustard-yellow sauce rather than a clear brine. Recipes of this kind are common in community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they solved a specific problem: the September garden gives up its last cucumbers, unripe tomatoes and cauliflower all at once, and a strong mustard-and-vinegar sauce preserves the lot while covering the flatness of underripe fruit. The flour thickening gives body quickly, without long reduction.