Home › Catsup, Pickles, Sauces and Salads › French Pickles
French Pickles
Two quarts cucumbers, 1 quart onions, 1 small head of cabbage, 1 small head of cauliflower, 2 bunches of celery. Add green peppers to taste. Cut all in small pieces, but do not chop finely. Sprinkle with salt, let stand 2 hours, then drain.
Scald in equal parts vinegar and water, and then remove from this. Make a paste of 2 cups sugar, 5 tablespoons mustard, 1 cup Five Roses flour, ½ gallon vinegar.
Boil this until it comes to a paste, and then pour over the pickles.
A mustard pickle of the chow-chow family, thickened with flour rather than reduced by long boiling. The hinge is the paste: it has to cook long enough to lose the raw-flour taste, and it has to go on hot.
- YieldThe vegetables come to somewhere between 4 and 6 quarts cut up, depending on how large the "small" cabbage and cauliflower are, and the sauce adds another 2 quarts, so the batch is a large one -- six quart jars or more. Halve it the first time if you have not made mustard pickle before.
- Five Roses flourThe house flour of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, a hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the direct substitute; 1 cup to 8 cups of vinegar is roughly 2 tablespoons per cup of liquid, which cooks down to a medium-bodied sauce -- the "paste" the recipe asks for.
- MustardFive tablespoons of dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. If your household version tastes flat, that is the culprit. There is no turmeric in the list, so the finished sauce is a pale mustard-tan rather than the bright yellow of commercial mustard pickle; a teaspoon of turmeric will colour it if you want that.
- "Salt" quantityThe recipe gives none. Something in the region of ½ cup of coarse pickling salt over 4 to 6 quarts of cut vegetables, tossed through and left to draw, suits this style. Plain non-iodised salt is preferable; additives in table salt can cloud the brine.
- ScaldingBring the vinegar-and-water to a boil, drop the vegetables in, and take them out as soon as it returns to a boil, a minute or two. The point is to heat them through, not cook them. Cucumber and cauliflower go limp fast.
- Making the pasteWhisk the sugar, mustard and flour together dry, then work in a little cold vinegar to a smooth slurry before adding the rest, or you will get lumps you cannot beat out. Boil it, stirring constantly, for a good 5 minutes after it thickens; flour sauces taste chalky if pulled off early.
- Vinegar strengthUse cider or white vinegar at 5% acidity. Half a gallon is 8 cups. Older vinegars varied, and some home vinegars were weaker, which is why period pickles sometimes failed to keep.
- Keeping itThe book gives no processing instructions, and none should be improvised. Pack hot into clean jars, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for a couple of months. Flour-thickened pickle is not a candidate for boiling-water canning in any case: the starch interferes with heat penetration, and no current tested process covers it.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and the pickle chapter is pure early-twentieth-century Canadian and New England household cooking: end-of-garden vegetables, cucumbers and cauliflower and celery, put down in a sweet mustard sauce before frost. The name "French pickles" turns up repeatedly in North American community cookbooks of the period for what is otherwise mustard pickle or chow-chow, and the connection to France appears to be nominal rather than culinary; "French" was doing much the same work in kitchen naming that "Spanish" or "Italian" did, signalling something a little dressed-up. What genuinely distinguishes it from an English piccalilli is the absence of turmeric and spice; the flour is no point of difference, since piccalilli is itself conventionally thickened with flour or cornflour. Still, a milling company's cookbook naturally found a use for a cup of flour in the pickle jar, and thickening the vinegar this way also stretched a small amount of sugar and mustard over a large batch of vegetables.