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Composition Pickle
1 gallon chopped cabbage, 1/2 1/2 gallon green tomatoes, sliced, 1/2 1/2 gallon cucumbers, 1 quart onions, all finely chopped. Let them stew several hours, then drain off the water. Add: 4 tablespoonfuls ground mustard. 2 tablespoonfuls ginger. 1 ounce cloves. 2 ounces turmeric. 2 ounces celery seed. 2 pounds brown sugar. 2 spoonfuls salt. 1/2 gallon strong vinegar; boil twenty minutes.--Mrs. C. C.
A large-batch chow-chow of the sort put up by the bushel in late summer, when the tomatoes would not ripen and the cabbage had to be dealt with. The quantities are for a household that expected to eat pickle all winter; scale down freely.
- "Let them stew several hours"This probably means let the chopped vegetables stand for several hours so they weep their water, which is then drained off; the receipt gives no direction to salt them at this stage, and salt is not listed until later, with the spices. On that reading nothing is cooked until the twenty-minute boil in vinegar at the end.
- Volume, not weightA gallon of chopped cabbage is about 16 cups, roughly two medium heads; half a gallon each of green tomatoes and cucumbers is 8 cups apiece, and a quart of onions is about 4 cups, or three large ones. Total yield is somewhere around six to seven quarts of finished pickle.
- The spice weights are enormousThe spice weights are large -- One ounce of ground cloves is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup, and two ounces of turmeric something over a third of a cup. They are as the receipt gives them for a batch this size, but will taste medicinal if you scale the vegetables down and leave the spices alone. Reduce everything by the same fraction.
- "Strong vinegar"The receipt does not say what kind; it means the strongest vinegar in the house, used undiluted. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength; modern bottled vinegar is standardised at 5 percent acidity, so use it straight from the bottle rather than cutting it.
- "2 spoonfuls salt"Ambiguous. Two tablespoons is the reasonable reading for this volume. Salt at the end to taste.
- Keeping itThe receipt stops at the boil and says nothing about jars or storage. Cooled and refrigerated, the pickle keeps for a month or two. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath process for pickled vegetables rather than simply sealing hot jars.
- TextureTwenty minutes of boiling is what makes this a soft, relish-style pickle rather than a crisp one. Cut it to ten if you want the cucumber and cabbage to keep some bite; the flavour will be thinner but the texture better.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives, which is why so many of its receipts end in a set of initials rather than a name. "Composition pickle" is one of many period names for what is now generally called chow-chow: a mixed vegetable pickle bound by mustard and turmeric, made at the end of the season from whatever the garden had failed to ripen. The turmeric and ground mustard give it a family resemblance to the English piccalilli tradition, itself an eighteenth-century imitation of Indian pickles. Green tomatoes appear here for a practical reason: frost was coming and the fruit was not going to turn red.