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Chopped Cabbage Pickle
Cut the cabbage as for slaw, pour over it enough boiling brine to cover it. Chop and scald a few onions in the same way, cover both, and leave twenty-four hours; then squeeze in a cloth until free from brine. If it should taste very salt, soak in clear water for a few hours and squeeze again. Loosen and mix the cabbage and onions thoroughly. To one-half gallon cabbage put: 1 small cut onion. 1 pound brown sugar. 1 small box mustard. 1/2 pound white mustard-seed. 1 small cup grated horseradish. 1/2 ounce mace. 1 tablespoonful ground black pepper. 2 ounces celery-seed. 1 ounce turmeric. Chopped celery and nasturtiums, if they can be had. Mix all, and cover with cold vinegar. If necessary, add more vinegar after it has stood awhile.-Mrs.
This is a chow-chow-type mustard pickle: cabbage salted down, wrung dry, then packed in spiced cold vinegar. The salting and squeezing are what keep it crisp, and skipping either gives a watery, limp relish.
- The brine is unspecified"enough boiling brine to cover" assumes the reader knows a pickling brine, which period books usually describe only qualitatively, as a strong salt brine rather than by measure. Since the salt is drawn back out by squeezing and soaking, the exact strength is less critical here than in a preserved pickle, but the original gives no figure and it is not worth guessing at one.
- "Cut as for slaw"Shredded fine, not diced. A half gallon of loosely packed shredded cabbage is 2 quarts, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 pounds of trimmed head, or one good-sized cabbage.
- A small box of mustardDry mustard powder, sold in tins of 2 to 4 ounces; use about 1/2 cup ground mustard. "White mustard-seed" is what is now sold as yellow mustard seed, the pale round kind, not the smaller brown.
- Spices by weightHalf an ounce of mace is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons ground; an ounce of turmeric about 3 tablespoons; 2 ounces of celery seed about 1/2 to 2/3 cup. These are assertive quantities and the turmeric is doing the coloring work as much as the flavoring.
- NasturtiumsThe green seed pods, pickled as a caper substitute, rather than the flowers, though period cooks used both. Capers are the closest substitute if you have no nasturtium plants.
- VinegarUse standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar, added cold as directed. Warming it would soften the cabbage; the whole point of the cold pack is crunch.
- StorageThere is no sealing or processing step here, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle rather than a shelf-stable canned one. Keep it covered with vinegar at all times and topped up as the cabbage absorbs liquid, as the recipe warns.
- Yield and useAbout 2 to 3 quarts, and it improves after a week or two. Served as a condiment with pork, beans, cold meat and fried fish rather than as a salad.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, carries a long run of pickles and catsups because a Southern larder in the 1870s depended on them: a cabbage cut in autumn could be kept edible in salt and vinegar through the winter, and the sharp, sweet, mustard-yellow relish it produced cut the monotony of salt pork and cornbread. Pickles of this exact type, chopped vegetables in mustard and turmeric, descend from English piccalilli and became known across the American South and the mid-Atlantic as chow-chow, a name generally traced to nineteenth-century trade usage but of uncertain origin. The nasturtium pods are the older English touch, recommended in cookbooks since the eighteenth century as a garden substitute for imported capers. The truncated attribution, "-Mrs.", is an artifact of the book's habit of crediting each receipt to the woman who sent it in.