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To Make Piccalilli
To one-half bushel nicely chopped tomatoes, which must be squeezed dry, add two dozen onions, chopped fine, one dozen green peppers, chopped, one box ground mustard, one large root horseradish, nearly one pint salt, four tablespoonfuls ground cloves, four tablespoonfuls allspice. Mix thoroughly in a stone jar and cover with vinegar, making a hole in the centre to let the vinegar to the bottom.--Mrs. B.
This is a raw crock pickle scaled for a farm household putting up the late-summer tomato crop. The proportions work, but the volume needs cutting by a factor of eight or more, and the storage needs rethinking.
- Half a bushelA bushel of tomatoes runs about 50-56 lb, so this begins with roughly 25 lb of whole fruit, and appreciably less once chopped and squeezed. One-eighth of the recipe (about 3 lb tomatoes, 3 onions, 1-2 peppers, a small piece of horseradish root, 2 oz salt, 1 1/2 tsp each of cloves and allspice, about 1/2 oz dry mustard) fills a large jar and is a sane first attempt.
- Which tomatoesThe recipe does not say. Piccalilli of this kind was commonly made with green, unripe tomatoes; they hold their texture in brine and give the sharp, firm bite the dish is known for. Ripe tomatoes collapse into a loose sauce. The instruction to squeeze them dry matters either way -- excess juice dilutes the vinegar and slows the cure.
- A box of ground mustardPackage sizes were not standardised; a quarter-pound box or tin, roughly a cup of powder, is the usual working assumption. Modern Colman's-style dry mustard is probably comparable in strength.
- Nearly one pint saltMeasured by volume, a pint of salt can weigh anywhere from about 10 oz to 20 oz depending on how coarse the grain is, so weigh rather than scoop if you can. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt with anti-caking agents clouds the brine and can darken the vegetables. The salt is doing preservation work here, not seasoning, so it is not optional.
- Stone jarA glazed earthenware crock. Any nonreactive vessel — glass, food-grade plastic, stoneware — will serve; avoid bare metal, which the vinegar will attack. The hole poked in the centre is there because a dense raw pack floats and traps dry pockets; press the vegetables down under the surface and keep them submerged with a plate or a water-filled bag.
- VinegarUse commercial cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Historical household vinegar varied widely, which is exactly why modern practice specifies a labeled strength — the acid is the other half of the preservation.
- Storage, which the original assumesMrs. B. expected a cold cellar and a crock that was dipped into regularly. This mixture is never heated and tomatoes are low-acid, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle: keep it cold and eat it within a couple of months. Do not seal it into jars for pantry storage; a current tested canning recipe should be used if you want a shelf-stable product.
- Curing time and yieldGive it two to three weeks in the cold before eating so the mustard and spices bloom and the vinegar reaches the centre. The full recipe fills a large crock -- several gallons once the vinegar is added; the eighth-scale version makes roughly a quart and a half.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens in the eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian pickle — early cookbooks spell it paco-lilla or India pickle — and the name is generally traced to that borrowing rather than to any single inventor. The British version leaned on cauliflower and a thick turmeric-mustard sauce; American versions, and Southern ones especially, went to green tomatoes, onions and sweet peppers, which is what appears here. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, prints recipes signed with initials and abbreviations like this one, and the half-bushel scale is a fair record of what that meant in practice: a single pickling day handling whatever the garden gave up before frost, packed into a crock in the cellar and drawn on all winter as the relish that made salt pork and cold meat interesting.