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Chow-Chow (Recipe is for one gallon)
The recipe is for one gallon pickle; for more, the quantities must be increased, of course. The ingredients consist of: 1/4 peck green tomatoes. 1 large head of cabbage. 6 large onions. 1 dozen cucumbers. 1/2 pint grated horseradish. 1/2 pound white mustard-seed. 1/2 ounce celery-seed. A few small onions. 1/4 teacup ground pepper. Turmeric, ground cinnamon. A little brown sugar.
Cut the cabbage, onions and cucumbers into small pieces, and pack them down in salt one night; then put in vinegar, poured over hot. Do this three mornings. The third morning, mix one box ground mustard with one-quarter pint salad oil. To be mixed in while warm.--Mrs. O. B.
A mustard pickle in the piccalilli family, built on the end-of-season garden. The original assumes you know how a salt-and-vinegar pickle works and leaves several quantities to your judgment.
- The measurements that need translatingA peck is 8 dry quarts, so 1/4 peck of green tomatoes is about 2 quarts, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb. A teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about 1/2 cup, which makes the 1/4 teacup of ground pepper roughly 2 tablespoons. A pint is 2 cups; half a pint of grated horseradish is 1 cup.
- "One box ground mustard"Genuinely ambiguous; there is no way to know what size tin the writer kept. Start at 2 oz (about 1/2 cup) whisked into the 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) of oil and taste before adding more.
- The unmeasured seasoningsTurmeric, cinnamon and brown sugar are given without amounts. For a gallon, 1 tablespoon turmeric, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 3 to 4 tablespoons brown sugar give the yellow color and faint sweetness intended without pushing it toward chutney.
- Ingredient namesWhite mustard-seed is what is now sold as yellow mustard seed. Salad oil meant a neutral table oil — cottonseed or a mild olive oil then; any neutral oil now. The recipe does not specify a vinegar; cider vinegar was common in American households of the period and suits this pickle. Use a full-strength 5 percent vinegar, not a diluted "salad" vinegar.
- The tomatoesThe method names only cabbage, onions and cucumbers, but the green tomatoes are meant to be sliced and salted with them. Salt overnight in a colander or crock, roughly 1/2 cup coarse salt to the whole batch, then drain and press out the liquid before the first vinegar goes on.
- Three mornings of hot vinegarThis is the hinge. Pour vinegar hot over the drained vegetables, let it stand a day, then drain that vinegar off, reheat it and pour it back — three times. Each round draws more water out and firms the vegetables. Skipping to a single pour gives a slack, watery pickle.
- Add the oil and mustard off the heatThe mustard-and-oil paste goes in while the pickle is warm, not boiling. Boiling dry mustard drives off its pungency and can make it bitter; warm vinegar is enough to bloom it.
- StoragePack into clean jars and keep refrigerated. Do not treat this as a shelf-stable canned product: the oil, the low sugar and the unmeasured vinegar-to-vegetable ratio put it outside any tested boiling-water-bath process. Refrigerated it holds for a month or two, improving for the first two weeks.
- YieldOne gallon, as stated — enough for eight pint jars, a winter's worth of condiment for a household that ate it with cold meat, beans and fried fish.
Chow-chow is the Southern and Pennsylvania Dutch name for a mixed mustard pickle, and the word is generally traced to the pidgin English of the China trade, where chow-chow meant a mixture or medley; the pickle itself owes far more to English piccalilli and, behind that, to the Anglo-Indian taste for turmeric-and-mustard achar that British cooks had absorbed by the eighteenth century. Its practical purpose is plain from the ingredient list: green tomatoes, late cabbage and the last of the cucumbers, all harvested ahead of frost and turned into something that would sit in a crock through the winter. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1877, gathered its recipes from named contributors and initialed acquaintances, which is why this one arrives signed "Mrs. O. B." and written as one experienced housekeeper would write to another — the seasonings left to taste, the salting and draining assumed rather than explained.