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Yellow Pickle (Gallons vinegar pounds sugar)
2 gallons vinegar. 2 pounds sugar. 1 ounce turmeri 3 ounces allspice 1 ounce cloves. 1 ounce mace. 1 pint mustard-seed. 2 tablespoonfuls celery-seed. Pound all together and stir into the hot cider vinegar for several minutes. Prepare your vegetables by quartering the cabbage and scalding them in brine; cover them and leave until cold; squeeze dry and hang in the sun; when bleached, throw in plain vinegar, then into the spiced vinegar.-Mrs. P. Yellow Pickle. 2 1/2 gallons vinegar. 7 pounds sugar. 1 pound white mustard-seed. 1 bottle mustard. 1 pound white ginger. 1/2 pound white pepper. 1/2 pound turmeric. 2 ounces nutmeg. 2 ounces allspice. 2 ounces cloves. 2 ounces celery-seed. Pound them all before putting in the vinegar, add one pound scraped horseradish, half-dozen lemons sliced.
Scald two dozen onions, sprinkle them with salt, and let them stand a day; drain off the water and wash well with the vinegar. Add them to your spiced vinegar. Cut your cabbage and scald them in strong salt water till you can run a straw through them; drain them for a day and put into plain vinegar for two weeks; let them drain again a day or two before putting into the prepared vinegar. Put two tablespoonfuls turmeric in the plain vinegar to turn the cabbage yellow.-Mrs. J. T. A.
Yellow Pickle.
One peck cabbage cut up. Lay in a jar, sprinkling with salt; leave it twenty-four hours; squeeze out and put in a kettle with half a dozen onions chopped, cover with vinegar, add one ounce turmeric, and boil one hour. Then add: 2 pounds brown sugar. 1/2 ounce mace. 1/2 ounce allspice. 1/2 ounce cloves. 4 tablespoonfuls mixed mustard. 1 teacup black peppercorn. 4 tablespoonfuls ground ginger. 2 tablespoonfuls celery-seed.
Boil till clear.-Mrs. S. B.
Yellow Pickle. 2 gallons cider vinegar. 4 ounces beaten white pepper. 4 ounces whole allspice. 4 ounces white mustard-seed. 4 ounces black mustard-seed. 2 ounces mace. 2 ounces turmeric. 2 ounces white ginger. 2 ounces ground mustard. 3 ounces garlic. 3 ounces horseradish. 2 gills celery-seed. 4 sliced lemons. 5 pounds brown sugar.
Should be prepared months before using. Cabbage to be pickled should be boiled or scalded in salt and water until the leaves can be turned back so as to sprinkle salt between them; then must be dried in the sun. Shake all the salt out when dry, and soak in plain vinegar, with a little turmeric sprinkled on each layer of cabbage. After ten days, drain them and put in the spiced vinegar.-Mrs. S. T.
Four contributors' versions of the same turmeric-and-mustard cabbage pickle, all built on a barrel-scale batch. Read them as one method with variations, and cut the quantities hard before you start.
- Scale firstTwo to two and a half gallons of spiced vinegar with anywhere from two to seven pounds of sugar is a winter's supply for a large household. A quarter batch, roughly two quarts of vinegar, is plenty for a modern kitchen.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so "2 gills celery-seed" is one cup. A teacup in books of this period is reckoned variously, somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup. A peck is a dry measure of eight quarts; depending on how the cabbage is cut and packed, expect roughly 9-12 lb of trimmed heads.
- "1 bottle mustard"Mrs. J. T. A. most likely means a bottle of prepared mustard, of a size no longer standard; half a cup is a reasonable working guess. "Mixed mustard" and "mustard" elsewhere in these recipes appear to mean the same prepared condiment, while "ground mustard" is dry powder.
- Turmeric is the pointThe yellow in yellow pickle is turmeric, not mustard. The instruction to sprinkle it into the plain vinegar between layers of cabbage is there to dye the leaves before they meet the spiced vinegar. It stains hands, wood and plastic stubbornly.
- The hinge: get the water outEvery version salts the cabbage and presses or drains it, and most scald it and drain a second time. Cabbage is mostly water, and water left in dilutes the vinegar. Squeeze the salted cabbage genuinely dry and let the vinegar-soaked cabbage drip a full day before the final packing.
- Skip the sun-bleachingTwo of these versions hang or spread the cabbage in the sun, which both dried and paled it; outdoors it collects dust and insects. Draining it in a colander in the refrigerator will not dry it as thoroughly, and the colour will be less blanched.
- Whole spices, not pounded to dust"Pound all together" would give a cloudy, heavily spiced vinegar. Cracking the allspice, cloves and mace and tying them in cheesecloth gives much the same flavour and a clearer brine.
- Vinegar strength and storageNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied; modern bottled vinegar is a reliable 5 percent acidity, which is what a pickle this sweet needs. Store the finished jars in the refrigerator rather than a crock in the pantry, and follow current canning guidance if you want them shelf-stable.
- TimeMrs. S. T. says it "should be prepared months before using," and a long rest does let the spices mellow; give it several weeks at least before judging it.
Yellow pickle is the American descendant of the English "Indian pickle," the turmeric-and-mustard vegetable pickle that eighteenth-century cookbooks copied from Anglo-Indian tables and that is generally traced forward into piccalilli and, by some accounts, into Southern chow-chow, though that line of descent is disputed. Cabbage and onions carried the spices, and the sugar and vinegar did the work of preservation in a house with no cold storage. That four separate contributors here, identified only as Mrs. P., Mrs. J. T. A., Mrs. S. B. and Mrs. S. T., each sent in a yellow pickle shows how the book was assembled: Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) gathered working recipes from named households rather than imposing one authoritative version, so the reader gets four sets of proportions and is left to judge between them.