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Chow-Chow (Peck onions peck green)
1/2 peck onions. 1/2 peck green tomatoes. 5 dozen cucumbers. Slice all very fine, and put in a few whole cucumbers, one pint small red and green peppers; sprinkle one pint salt over them, and let them stand all night; then add: 1 ounce mace. 1 ounce white mustard-seed. 1 ounce celery-seed. 1 ounce turmeric. 1 ounce whole cloves. 3 tablespoonfuls ground mustard. 2 pounds brown sugar. 1 stalk horseradish, grated fine.
Cover all with one gallon and one pint of strong vinegar, and boil thirty minutes.--Miss E. T.
Chow-chow. 1/2 peck onions. 1/2 peck green tomatoes. 3 dozen large cucumbers. 4 large green peppers. 1/2 pint small peppers, red and green. Sprinkle one pint salt on, and let them stand all night; the cucumbers not peeled, but sliced one inch thick, the onions also sliced. In the morning drain off the brine, and add to the pickles: 1 ounce mace. 1 ounce black pepper. 1 ounce white mustard-seed. 1 ounce turmeric. 1/2 ounce cloves. 1/2 ounce celery-seed. 3 tablespoonfuls made mustard. 2 pounds brown sugar. With a little horseradish. Cover with vinegar, and boil till tender, a half-hour or more When cold, ready for use.--Mrs. C. N.
Two versions of the same end-of-garden pickle, both written for a household putting up several gallons at once. Read the quantities before you shop: either batch fills a small crock.
- What a peck weighsA peck is 8 dry quarts; a half peck of onions runs roughly 6-7 lb, a half peck of green tomatoes 6-7 lb. The recipe does not say what size cucumbers are meant, though five dozen for a batch of this size points to smaller pickling cucumbers. Quartering the whole recipe gives something over a gallon of finished chow-chow and is the sane place to start.
- The salt stepA pint of salt is close to a pound of coarse salt. It is there to draw water out of the vegetables overnight so the pickle is not thin and watery; Mrs. C. N. says to drain the brine off in the morning, and Miss E. T. probably intended the same, though she does not say so. Drain well, and rinse if you want a less salty result.
- Ground mustard and made mustard"Ground mustard" is dry mustard powder. "Made mustard" is the prepared paste, mustard flour already mixed with vinegar. The two are not interchangeable spoon for spoon; three tablespoons of powder is considerably sharper than three of paste.
- Whole spicesThe first recipe specifies whole cloves, and mace and black pepper were commonly sold in blade or whole form at this date. Whole cloves left loose can leave the pickle bitter and gritty, so tie the whole spices in a cloth bag and lift it out at the end; keep the turmeric, celery seed and mustard seed loose, since they are meant to stay in.
- Vinegar strength"Strong vinegar" was not a standardised measure and could be stronger or weaker than the 5 percent acetic acid that supermarket cider and distilled vinegar carry today. Use vinegar labelled at least 5 percent and do not cut it with water; the acid is what preserves the jar.
- Boiling time and textureThirty minutes at a boil will leave the cucumbers soft and dull, and the second recipe's "boil till tender, a half-hour or more" suggests that was accepted here. If you want any snap left, bring the whole to a boil, simmer 10-15 minutes until the onions turn translucent, and stop there.
- Horseradish"One stalk" means one root, grated on the fine side, perhaps 3-4 oz. Most of its heat volatilises during the half-hour boil, so it reads as background warmth rather than bite.
- StorageNeither version gives any instruction for sealing; pickles of this kind were commonly kept in a crock or in jars in a cold cellar. Pack the hot pickle into clean jars and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for months; for shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested processing schedule for pickled vegetables rather than the book.
Chow-chow is the mixed vegetable pickle that turns up wherever an American kitchen garden had to be cleared before frost, which is why it leans on green tomatoes, onions and cucumbers that will never ripen. The name is generally traced to the pidgin English of the China trade, where chow-chow meant a mixture or medley of odds and ends, and it attached itself in the nineteenth century to sweet-sour mustard pickles of exactly this kind; the turmeric, mustard and mace in the spicing show the same Anglo-Indian and East India Company pantry that produced piccalilli. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered its contents from named Virginia housewives and printed them as they were sent in, initials and all, which is why two neighbours' versions of the same pickle sit here one after the other, differing in the number of cucumbers and whether the mustard was wet or dry.