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Spanish Pickles
Three dozen large cucumbers, two large green apples, one-half peck of onions, one-half peck of green tomatoes. Chop all and sprinkle with a pint of salt; let it remain over night in a colander to drain. Then put it into a kettle and add one-half cup of grated horesradish, one-half ounce white mustard seed, one-fourth ounce of mace, one-eighth ounce of white pepper, one-half ounce of celery seed, one-fourth ounce of cloves, three tablespoons of mustard, one and one-half pounds of brown sugar, vinegar enough to cover all; boil one-half hour. When done pack in air-tight bottles or jars.
— Mrs. Caroline A. Day
A chopped mixed pickle of the sort every Catskill household put up in early autumn, when cucumbers, unripened tomatoes and onions all came in at once. The measurements are worth decoding, but the preserving method is the part that has not aged.
- Why this one fails todayThe vinegar is unmeasured ("enough to cover") and of unstated strength, and the jars are simply packed hot and sealed with no boiling-water processing. Acidity in a chopped relish this heavy on low-acid vegetables — onions, green tomatoes, cucumbers — depends entirely on the vinegar-to-vegetable ratio, and here it is left to the cook's eye. Use a current tested relish recipe from a reliable preserving source if you want to can this style of pickle.
- Vinegar strength has changedNineteenth-century household vinegar was variable and often home-made from cider, sometimes weaker and sometimes sharper than the 5 percent acetic acid standard sold now. A recipe that never specifies strength cannot be relied on to reach a safe pH.
- "Air-tight bottles or jars"Probably a wax-sealed or wire-bail jar filled hot and left to cool; the recipe does not say. Whatever the closure, it produces a seal rather than a processed jar, and recipes of this kind generally do not distinguish between the two.
- Half a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts: very roughly 6 to 7 lb of onions, and a similar weight of green tomatoes, depending on how they are packed.
- Spices by weightWhole spices were sold and measured by the ounce. A quarter ounce of cloves is about a tablespoon whole; half an ounce of celery seed is about two tablespoons. "Three tablespoons of mustard," listed separately from the whole white mustard seed above it, most likely means dry ground mustard.
- MaceThe lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold in blades or ground. It is milder and more floral than nutmeg and was a standard pickling spice; blades were often tied in a cloth bag and lifted out.
- The overnight saltingA pint of salt on that volume of vegetables is a drawing-out step, not a preservative one — the colander is there so the brine runs off rather than pooling. This part of the method is sound and survives in modern relish recipes.
- ScaleThree dozen cucumbers plus half a peck each of onions and green tomatoes is a canning-day batch of many quarts. It assumes a large kettle and a household that ate pickles with everything.
Chopped mixed pickles of this kind — cucumber, green tomato, onion, sugar, mustard and vinegar — were a common American answer to the end of the garden season, and appear in community cookbooks under a scattering of names: chow chow, piccalilli, India pickle, and, as here, Spanish pickle. The names were rarely geographic in any real sense; "Spanish" and "India" attached loosely to anything mustard-yellow and highly spiced, a habit often traced to the British colonial pickles that American cooks inherited and adapted. The green apple and grated horseradish are the less usual additions here, though neither is peculiar to any one region, and the quantity is large enough to suggest a household putting up several gallons at a time. The attribution to Mrs. Caroline A. Day is typical of village fundraising cookbooks, where each receipt carried its contributor's name and reputation.