Hyden Salad
1 gallon cabbage. 1/2 gallon green tomatoes. 1/4 gallon onions,-all chopped fine. 4 tablespoonfuls salt. 2 tablespoonfuls ginger. 2 tablespoonfuls cloves. 1 tablespoonful cinnamon. 2 tablespoonfuls mustard. 1 1/2 pounds brown sugar. Plenty of celery-seed. 1/2 gallon strong vinegar.
Boil the whole one-half hour.--Mrs. H. D.
Hyden Salad.
Cut one gallon cabbage as for slaw, one-half gallon green tomatoes. Cut up one pint green pepper, taking out the seed carefully and cutting up the pod (do not use the seed), one quart onions cut up, and the water pressed from them and thrown away.
Mix all these, and sprinkle through them 2 tablespoonfuls salt, and let them stand over night. Then take: 2 pounds sugar. 3 large spoonfuls ginger. 3 large spoonfuls turmeric. 3 spoonfuls celery-seed. 3 spoonfuls ground mustard. 2 spoonfuls allspice. 2 spoonfuls cinnamon. 1 spoonful cloves. 1 spoonful mace. Beat all fine, and mix with the salad; pour over the whole three quarts good vinegar, and simmer for twenty minutes. Ready for use very soon, and very good.--Mrs. C. M. A.
Hyden Salad. 1 gallon cabbage, chopped fine. 1/2 gallon green tomatoes, chopped fine. 1/2 pint green pepper, chopped fine. 1 pint onions, chopped fine. Sprinkle salt, and let it stand overnight; next morning, pour boiling water over, and squeeze dry. Take: 2 ounces ginger. 4 tablespoonfuls ground mustard. 1 ounce cinnamon. 1 ounce cloves. 2 ounces turmeric. 1 ounce celery-seed. 2 pounds sugar. 2 spoonfuls salt. 1/2 gallon vinegar. Boil ten minutes.--Mrs. H. Hyden Salad.
Cut up fine, 1 gallon cabbage. 1/2 gallon green tomatoes. 1/2 pint green pepper. 1 quart onions minced, the juice thrown away. Add to all these: 4 tablespoonfuls ground mustard. 2 tablespoonfuls ginger. 1 tablespoonful cinnamon. 1 tablespoonful cloves. 2 ounces of turmeric. 1 ounce celery-seed. 2 pounds sugar. 2 tablespoonfuls salt.
Mix all well together, add one-half gallon good vinegar, and boil slowly twenty minutes. Take the seed out of the green pepper. Make late in the summer.--Mrs. R.
Hyden Salad. 1 gallon of finely chopped cabbage. 1 1/2 gallon green tomatoes. 1 pint green peppers-1/2 pint will do. 1 quart onions. 1/2 pint horseradish. 1 pound sugar. 1/2 gallon vinegar. 4 tablespoonfuls ground mustard. 2 tablespoonfuls ginger. 1 tablespoonful cloves. 1 tablespoonful cinnamon. 1 tablespoonful celery-seed. 2 spoonfuls salt.
Beat the spice well, mix all together well, and boil fifteen minutes. Black peppers can be used instead of the green, one table spoonful ground.--Mrs. E.
Five versions of the same mustard-and-turmeric cabbage pickle, contributed by five different households and printed one after another. Any one of them stands alone; read them side by side and the family resemblance to chow-chow and piccalilli is obvious.
- The measures are volume, not weightA gallon of finely chopped cabbage is roughly 4 lb of trimmed cabbage, or two medium heads; half a gallon of chopped green tomatoes is about 3 lb. A quart of chopped onions is around 1 1/4 lb. Each version yields somewhere between five and eight quarts of finished relish, so halve or quarter unless you are feeding a household.
- "Large spoonfuls" and "plenty"Mrs. C. M. A.'s "3 large spoonfuls" and Mrs. H. D.'s "plenty of celery-seed" are genuinely unfixed quantities. A tablespoon is the sensible reading, but these were cooks measuring by eye into a preserving kettle.
- The turmeric is heavy by modern standardsTwo ounces of ground turmeric is close to half a cup. It was there for colour as much as flavour, and modern turmeric is generally fresher and more assertive than the ground spice sold in the 1870s. Start with a third of the stated amount and taste.
- Salting overnight is the step that mattersThe versions that salt the vegetables and stand them overnight, then squeeze dry, produce a crisp relish. Skipping it gives you a watery one, since cabbage and green tomatoes are mostly water and the vinegar cannot draw it out during a twenty-minute simmer.
- "Strong vinegar"Nineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely in strength. Use standard 5 percent cider or distilled vinegar; anything weaker is less reliable as a preservative, even in the refrigerator.
- "Beat all fine"The spices were often bought whole and pounded in a mortar. Pre-ground spices are fine, but ginger, allspice and mace lose their edge quickly, so buy small and recent.
- Cooking time and textureTen minutes (Mrs. H.) gives a relish with some bite; half an hour (Mrs. H. D.) collapses the cabbage. The five versions call for thirty, twenty, ten, twenty and fifteen minutes; twenty minutes at a bare simmer sits in the middle of that range.
- StorageNone of these five gives a canning procedure, and "ready for use very soon" suggests it was eaten from the storage vessel rather than sealed. Treat the finished relish as a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a couple of months. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath recipe for pickled relish rather than this one.
- SeasonMrs. R.'s note to "make late in the summer" is practical advice: this is an end-of-garden pickle, made from the green tomatoes that will never ripen and the last of the cabbage and peppers.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish appears five times over with five sets of initials attached. The recipe itself is a chow-chow: a sweet-sour mustard pickle of chopped autumn vegetables, closely related to English piccalilli, whose turmeric-and-mustard yellow is generally traced to Anglo-Indian pickling adopted into British kitchens in the eighteenth century. The name "Hyden salad" is not standard and does not appear widely elsewhere; the likeliest explanation is a family or local name carried into the book by the first contributor and then repeated as a heading for the versions that followed, a common pattern in subscription cookbooks compiled from handwritten receipts. What the cluster really records is a preserving habit rather than a fixed formula: everyone made it, everyone made it slightly differently, and the editor printed them all.