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Leesburg Chow-Chow
1/2 peck green tomatoes. 2 large heads cabbage. 15 large white onions. 25 cucumbers.
Cut these up, and pack in salt for a night. Drain off, and then soak in vinegar and water for two days. Drain again. Mix with this, then: 1 pint grated horseradish. 1/2 pint small white onions. 1/2 pound white mustard-seed. 1 ounce celery-seed. 1/2 teacup ground black pepper. 1/2 teacup turmeric. 1/2 teacup cinnamon.
Pour over one and a half gallons boiling hot vinegar. Boil this vinegar for three mornings; the third morning, mix with two boxes mustard, three pounds brown sugar, and half-pint sweet oil.--Mrs. J. B. D.
A full crock-sized batch of Virginia mixed pickle, written for a household that put up vegetables by the bushel. The measurements are period ones, and the quantities are very large; halving or quartering everything is sensible.
- Half a peck of tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts, roughly 6 to 7 lb of green tomatoes. With the cabbage, onions and cucumbers this is at least 20 lb of vegetables before salting, and could be considerably more depending on the size of the heads and cucumbers.
- TeacupA nineteenth-century teacup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, generally taken as about 3/4 cup, though usage varied. Half a teacup of turmeric or cinnamon is therefore roughly 5 to 6 tablespoons; start at the low end, since a half-cup of cinnamon will dominate everything.
- Two boxes mustardGenuinely ambiguous. Ground mustard was sold in small tins and boxes of no standard size, so the quantity cannot be recovered with any confidence; something in the region of half a pound is a reasonable guess. Mix it to a paste with a little of the hot vinegar before stirring it in, or it will lump.
- Sweet oilOlive oil, and in this period usually a mild one rather than a green peppery pressing. It is there to soften the mustard bite and coat the vegetables.
- Salt and vinegarUse coarse pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt clouds the brine. Cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the sensible modern stand-in, though period vinegar varied in strength, and a gallon and a half is the right order of magnitude for this volume of vegetables.
- The three morningsDraining the vinegar off, boiling it, and pouring it back hot on three successive days is an old way of driving heat and acid into dense vegetable pieces without cooking them to mush. It works, but the same effect comes from cutting the pieces small and giving them one thorough boil in the spiced vinegar. Do not skip the salting and soaking stages; they are what keeps the finished chow-chow crisp.
- CucumbersSmall pickling cucumbers, not the waxed salad kind. If yours are large and seedy, halve them lengthwise and scrape the seeds out before cutting.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing instructions, as was common for a pickle of this kind, which would most likely have been kept in a crock in a cool place and eaten through the winter. Keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for a few months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath process rather than this one.
- YieldSomewhere between 2 and 3 gallons of finished relish, depending on how much liquid you carry over. A quarter batch fills about four pint jars.
Chow-chow is the general American name for a mixed vegetable pickle bound with mustard and turmeric, and it turns up across the South, the mid-Atlantic and Pennsylvania German country in dozens of local versions. The name is usually traced to trade with China through the same channels that brought mustard-and-turmeric pickles into English cookery, though the etymology has never been settled. What is certain is the function: green tomatoes are what a garden gives you at the first frost, and a crock of chow-chow turned that glut into a year's worth of sharp relish for the salt pork, beans and cold meat that dominated winter tables. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) collected its recipes from named contributors across the state, and the town attributions -- Leesburg here -- record whose kitchen a version came from as much as where it was eaten. The scale of this one is a reminder that putting up pickles was a day's organized work, not an afternoon project.