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Ragout Pickle
2 gallons chopped cabbage. 2 gallons green or ripe tomatoes. 5 tablespoons of mustard, ground. 3 gills mustard-seed. 2 tablespoonfuls allspice. 2 teaspoonfuls cloves 1 gill salt. 1 pint chopped onions. 1 pound brown sugar. Some chopped celery, or celery-seed. 3 quarts good cider vinegar. Boil all well together, and it is ready for use.--Miss E. T.
A chow-chow in all but name, scaled for a farmhouse pantry. The measurements are workable once the old vessels are translated, and the only real gap is that the original never says how long to boil or what to do with the finished pickle.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So 3 gills of mustard-seed is 1 1/2 cups, and 1 gill of salt is 1/2 cup. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt will cloud the brine.
- ScaleTwo gallons of chopped cabbage is roughly 6 to 7 lb of trimmed heads, and two gallons of tomatoes somewhere between 12 and 16 lb. The finished pickle reduces considerably from the raw volume, but the recipe gives no yield and any figure is a guess. Halving or quartering the recipe changes nothing but the pot size.
- PotThe raw ingredients come to some twenty quarts before cooking, so you need a very large preserving pan or stockpot, and a heavy one. A thin pan will scorch the sugar on the bottom long before the cabbage softens.
- Green or ripe tomatoesThe two give quite different results. Green tomatoes stay firm and sharp and are the traditional choice for this style of pickle; ripe ones break down and give a softer, sweeter, wetter relish that needs longer boiling to thicken.
- Boil all well togetherRead this as 30 to 45 minutes at a steady simmer, uncovered, stirring often, until the cabbage is tender and the liquid has reduced enough that a spoon dragged across the bottom leaves a brief track. Undercooked, it tastes raw and watery.
- Vinegar strength"Good cider vinegar" in the nineteenth century was variable. Use a commercial cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; the acid is doing the preserving as well as the flavouring.
- Whole spicesThe allspice and cloves may well have been whole; the recipe specifies "ground" only for the mustard. Whole spices left loose will keep releasing clove into the jars for months, which can turn the whole batch medicinal. Ground spices will darken and cloud it.
- StorageThe recipe says only that it is ready for use, and gives no keeping instructions. Cooled and refrigerated in clean jars, it keeps a month or two. For shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure rather than the old practice of ladling hot pickle into jars and sealing them.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree in 1878, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one arrives signed only "Miss E. T." The dish itself belongs to the large Anglo-American family of chopped mustard pickles: piccalilli, chow-chow, mixed pickle, all built on cabbage or green tomatoes cut fine, cooked in sweetened spiced vinegar, and kept as a sharp counterweight to boiled meat and cold ham through the winter. "Ragout" here is used loosely for a mixture of many things cooked together rather than in its French sense of a stew. The enormous quantity is the giveaway that this was a seasonal, once-a-year job, made at the end of summer when the tomato vines were pulled and the last green fruit had to be used up rather than wasted.