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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Piccalilli
Piccalilli, or Indian Pickle. This consists of a great variety of succulent vegetables (the more varied the better) mixed and pickled together.
To make piccalilli slice 1 hard white cabbage head, remove the outer leaves, pull to pieces 2 cauliflowers, add 20 selected French beans, 1 root of horseradish, sliced fine, 2 dozen pickling onions, 1 dozen green gherkins of uniform size. Let stand in brine three or four days, drain through a colander, and place in a preserving kettle. Add 2 ounces of curry powder, 1 ounce of garlic, 1 ounce of ginger, 1 ounce of white mustard seed, ounce of capsicum or paprika. Cover with vinegar and bring to a boil. Preserve in glasses tightly sealed.
Or pull apart the branches of a large head of cauliflower, cut a hard white cabbage head in quarters, remove the outer leaves, chop it fine or shred it as for cold slaw. Slice a number of cucumbers and pickling onions, French beans, radish pods, nasturtiums, samphire, and any other vegetables at hand. Place these in a large sieve, sprinkle them with salt and lay them out in the sun for three or four days to dry. Now place them in a preserving kettle, cover with cold vinegar, and bring to a boil. Let them boil up once. Pack in glass and seal.
Or if it is desired to make an extra quality, keep all the ingredients separate and scald them separately in hot vinegar, but do not put them together until they are cold. Bruise together in a mortar 4 ounces of ginger, ounces of whole white pepper, 2 ounces of allspice, ounce of chilis, 4 ounces of turmeric. Add pound of shallots, 1 ounce of garlic, pound of bay salt. Cover with 1 gallon of vinegar and boil thirty minutes. Strain through cheese cloth and add 1 pound of mustard rubbed up free from lumps with a small quantity of cold VINEGAR, PICKLES, AND PICKLING vinegar. Then dilute with more vinegar to the consistency of milk and stir into the pickling liquid. When the pickling liquid is cold pour it over the pickles. Mix well and pack in glass bottles or a large jar corked or sealed to exclude the air.
Piccalilli if well prepared should improve with age.
Three overlapping methods are given here, and none of them can be followed safely as printed: the acidity is unmeasured, the jars are never processed, and the original's fractional weights have been lost in the printing. The notes below explain the terms and the specific failures.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities in this text begin with a dropped fraction — "ounce of capsicum", "ounces of whole white pepper", "pound of shallots", "pound of bay salt". The original presumably carried a fraction or mixed number in each case (the plural "ounces" implies something like 1½ or 2½). There is no way to recover which, so the spice and salt levels are genuinely unknown rather than merely archaic.
- Why the acidity failsSafe vinegar pickling depends on the finished brine holding at or below pH 4.6, which in practice means 5 percent acetic acid vinegar used undiluted in a measured ratio to vegetables. Here the vinegar strength is not stated, the liquid is boiled for thirty minutes, strained, thinned with a mustard slurry "to the consistency of milk" and let down with more vinegar at the cook's discretion, and the quantity of vegetables it is poured over is never weighed. That is an unknown final acidity over a low-acid vegetable mix.
- Cold pack, no processThe third method deliberately assembles everything cold: the ingredients are scalded separately, kept apart until cold, and the cold pickling liquid poured over before sealing. None of the three methods is processed in a boiling-water bath after the jars are closed. Cabbage, cauliflower, onions and green beans are all low-acid; sealed anaerobically without adequate acid or a timed heat process, they are exactly the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin.
- The brine and the sun"Let stand in brine three or four days" gives no salt concentration, and the alternative spreads salted vegetables outdoors in a sieve for three or four days. Both are unmeasured salt treatments carried out at ambient temperature, and neither gives the cook any figure to work to.
- Preserving kettle and glassesA preserving kettle is a wide, heavy pan, often unlined copper or brass in this period; for anything this acidic use stainless or enamel, never bare copper, brass or aluminium. "Glasses" simply means glass jars, and "corked or sealed to exclude the air" reflects a period when a cork and a wax seal were considered sufficient closure.
- Vegetables you may not recogniseFrench beans are ordinary green beans. Radish pods are the green seed pods that form after a radish bolts. Nasturtiums here most likely means the unripe seed pods, once pickled as a caper substitute. Samphire may be either marsh samphire (Salicornia, sold now as sea beans and already salty) or rock samphire, both of which were pickled. Capsicum in this period usually means a ground red pepper rather than sweet pepper.
- Bay salt and gherkinsBay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, unrefined and free of anti-caking agents — a coarse sea salt is the closest thing. Green gherkins are small immature pickling cucumbers, not the sweet pickled article sold under that name today.
- If you want piccalilliUse a current tested recipe with weighed vegetables, a stated vinegar strength and a timed water-bath process. The spice combination in the third method — ginger, allspice, turmeric, chilli, mustard, shallot, garlic — is worth reading for its own sake and is recognisably the ancestor of what is still sold as piccalilli.
Piccalilli is often said to be the English domestication of Indian achar, and eighteenth-century cookbooks are candid about the debt: recipes titled "To make India Pickle" or "Paco-lilla" appear in British manuscript and printed collections from the mid-eighteenth century onward, Hannah Glasse's among the best known. The name's origin is unsettled and usually described as a corruption of some Anglo-Indian word rather than traced to any documented source. What travelled was the technique — vegetables salted or sun-dried, then held in a spiced vinegar with turmeric, mustard and ginger — which suited a British kitchen that already pickled everything and now had cheap colonial spice to do it with. By the time this book was compiled the dish had split in two: a coarse mustard-and-turmeric relish on the British side, and in American kitchens a chopped green-tomato-and-cabbage pickle that kept the name and dropped most of the curry. This entry sits at the join, offering a straight curry-powder version, a rough sun-dried one, and an "extra quality" method that grinds its own spice mixture in a mortar. The closing remark that piccalilli "should improve with age" is the whole point of a household pickle shelf: it was made in autumn glut to be eaten in February.