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Spanish Pickle
4 dozen large cucumbers. 4 large green peppers. 1/2 peck onions. 1/2 peck green tomatoes.
Slice the whole, and sprinkle over with one pint salt, allow them to remain over night, then drain them. Put the whole into a preserving kettle, and add the following ingredients: sliced horseradish according to your judgement, one ounce mace, one ounce white pepper, one ounce turmeric, one ounce white mustard-seed, half an ounce cloves, half an ounce celery-seed, four tablespoonfuls of dry mustard, one and a half pounds brown sugar. Cover the whole with vinegar, and boil it one hour.--Mrs. J. J. M.
This is a mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickle of the chow-chow family, written for a household putting up winter stores in bulk. The quantities are the first thing to deal with.
- Yield, and why you should quarter itFour dozen cucumbers plus half a peck each of onions and green tomatoes (a peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 10-12 lb, so half a peck is 5-6 lb of each) makes an enormous batch, far more than a domestic kettle will hold and well over a dozen quarts finished. A quarter of the recipe is plenty for a household, and the spices scale down proportionally.
- The pint of saltA pint of salt is about a pound. Use pickling or kosher salt, not iodized table salt, which clouds the brine and can darken the vegetables. The overnight salting draws out water so the finished pickle is not soupy; drain well but do not rinse away all the salt.
- Vinegar strength"Cover the whole with vinegar" assumes a strong household vinegar. Use a commercial cider or white vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity, and expect to need a great deal of it -- several quarts even for a reduced batch. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid specialty vinegar.
- Preserving kettleThis means a large, wide, non-reactive pot: stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Bare aluminum, cast iron and unlined copper all react with hot vinegar and will turn the pickle metallic and gray.
- One hour is too long for cucumbersAn hour at a boil was meant to reduce and thicken a very large mass. In a quartered batch the cucumbers collapse to mush in that time. Bring it to a boil, then simmer 15 to 25 minutes, until the onions are translucent and the syrup has thickened slightly.
- Handle the spices as whole and ground separatelyMace, cloves, celery seed and white pepper are best tied in a cheesecloth bag and pulled at the end, or they speck the pickle and the cloves take over. The turmeric, dry mustard and mustard seed go in loose; whisk the dry mustard and turmeric with a ladleful of vinegar first so they do not lump.
- Horseradish "according to your judgement"Fresh horseradish root, peeled and thinly sliced. Add enough to give a noticeable bite without dominating, tasting as you go; its heat fades considerably over weeks in vinegar.
- StorageThe recipe stops at the boil and says nothing about sealing, as many nineteenth-century pickle recipes do. Pack into clean jars and keep refrigerated, or follow a current tested boiling-water-canning procedure with specified headspace and processing time if you intend to store it on a shelf.
- ServingA relish, not a side dish. It goes with cold ham, roast pork, beans and cornbread, and improves after two or three weeks in the jar.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, devotes many pages to pickles, because a Southern larder was judged partly by them. This one belongs to the broad family of mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickles that English cooks called piccalilli and American cooks generally called chow-chow. Piccalilli is usually traced to the eighteenth-century English "India pickle"; the origin of "chow-chow" is disputed and is more often linked to Chinese pidgin than to South Asian achar. Why Virginians attached "Spanish" to this particular version is not documented; the turmeric here gives an unmistakable yellow. The real logic of the recipe is seasonal: it uses up the tail end of the garden, the cucumbers that grew too large to pickle whole and the tomatoes that will never ripen before frost.