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Corn Relish
One dozen corn (evergreen or sweet corn), 1 small cabbage, 2 large red peppers, 4. pound mustard, 3 pints white vinegar, 3 cups granulated sugar, ½ cup salt, 2 tablespoons celery seed. Boil 30 minutes and can hot.
The relish mixture itself is a conventional sweet-sour corn relish, but the preservation method — boil, fill jars, seal, and nothing further — is the reason this page cannot be followed. The notes below cover both the failure and the archaic readings in the ingredient list.
- Why the canning fails"Can hot" is open-kettle canning: hot food sealed into jars with no boiling-water processing afterward. The jar interior is not held at a lethal temperature long enough, the lid seal is formed by cooling steam alone, and any contamination introduced during filling survives. Corn is a low-acid vegetable, and a jar of low-acid vegetables sealed anaerobically at room temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum.
- The acidity is unverifiedThree pints of vinegar sounds generous, but the recipe gives no vinegar strength and the total vegetable bulk — twelve ears of corn plus a whole cabbage plus two large peppers — is not fixed by weight. A shelf-stable acidified relish needs a known, tested acid-to-vegetable ratio, and this recipe cannot supply one. Use a current tested corn relish recipe with a specified processing time instead.
- "4. pound mustard"Most likely a typesetting error for ¼ pound of dry mustard, which is roughly a cup by volume and consistent with relishes of the period. Four pounds is absurd and one pound would overwhelm the batch. The measurement as printed is genuinely unusable.
- "One dozen corn"Twelve ears, not twelve cups. Cut from the cob that yields roughly 6 cups of kernels, or about 2 lb.
- Evergreen cornStowell's Evergreen, a white sweet corn widely grown in North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and still sold as an heirloom variety. It was valued for staying in the milk stage late in the season, which is part of why it turns up in preserving books.
- The saltHalf a cup measured as coarse pickling salt weighs appreciably less than half a cup of modern fine table salt, so the same volume of fine salt would give a saltier batch. The recipe does not specify which is meant.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the ingredient volumes suggest something in the region of eight pints or more, depending on how far it reduces in the half-hour boil.
Corn relish belongs to the late-summer glut cookery of North American farm kitchens, where a surplus of sweet corn and cabbage arrived at the same moment and both had to be dealt with before frost. The formula — corn, cabbage, sweet peppers, dry mustard, sugar, vinegar, celery seed — is remarkably stable across community and milling-company cookbooks from the 1890s onward, which suggests it circulated by copying rather than invention. Its appearance in a flour company's book is characteristic: Five Roses, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was distributed to Canadian households as promotional matter and padded out its baking chapters with the general run of preserving, pickling and catsup recipes that any homemaker of the period expected to find. The blunt instruction to "can hot" reflects standard household practice before boiling-water and pressure processing times were established and disseminated by agricultural extension services in the 1910s and 1920s.