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Yellow Pickled Cabbage
1 ounce turmeric. 1 gill black pepper. 1 gill celery-seed. A few cloves. A few pieces of ginger. 4 tablespoonfuls made mustard. 1/2 ounce mace. 2 pounds sugar. 1 tablespoonful allspice.
Take one peck of quartered cabbage; slice them and put a layer of cabbage and one of salt; let it remain over night. In the morning squeeze them and put on the fire with four chopped onions, and cover with vinegar; boil for an hour, then add the spices mentioned above, and let it boil an hour longer; when cold it is ready for use.-Mrs. W. H. M.
A QUICK WAY TO MAKE YELLOW PICKLE.
Two gallons chopped cabbage, sprinkle one handful salt through it, and let stand over night. Squeeze it out dry and put into a kettle. Add one ounce of celery-seed, one ounce of turmeric, one quarter-pound of mustard-seed, (black and white mixed), five pounds brown sugar, with vinegar enough to cover the whole well.
Boil until the cabbage is tender. Put it in stone jars and keep it closely covered. It is fit for use the day after it is made.-Mrs. J. C. W.
Two versions of the same Virginia standby: a turmeric-yellow sweet cabbage pickle in the piccalilli family. The measurements are generous nineteenth-century volumes, and the boiling times belong to a kitchen that wanted the vegetable cooked into submission.
- Gills and pecksA gill is half a cup, so a gill each of black pepper and celery seed is 1/2 cup each — an enormous amount of pepper by modern taste, and worth cutting to a tablespoon or two unless you want a fiercely hot pickle. A peck of cabbage is 8 dry quarts, roughly 10-12 lb as bought; after salting, squeezing and long boiling it will cook down to a good deal less than that.
- Spices by weightAn ounce of ground turmeric is about 1/4 cup; half an ounce of mace about 2 tablespoons. Buy turmeric fresh if you can — old ground turmeric loses colour and turns dusty-tasting, and colour is the whole point of a yellow pickle.
- Made mustard"Made mustard" is prepared mustard paste, not dry powder. Four tablespoons of a plain sharp yellow or English prepared mustard is the intent; if substituting dry mustard, use about half as much and expect more heat.
- The two hours of boilingTwo hours reduces sliced cabbage to a soft, olive-toned mash. Fifteen to twenty minutes after the vinegar comes to a boil, plus another five with the spices in, gives cabbage that still has some bite and keeps its yellow. The second recipe's "boil until tender" is the better guide.
- The overnight saltingThis is the step that decides the texture. Layered salt draws out water so the pickle is not diluted and does not go slack; squeeze the cabbage genuinely dry in a cloth before it meets the vinegar. Rinse briefly first if you want a less salty result.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — cider vinegar suits the sugar, distilled white keeps the turmeric brightest. Homemade or unlabelled vinegar of unknown strength is a common cause of spoilage in pickles.
- SugarTwo pounds of sugar to a peck of cabbage, or five pounds to two gallons, is a sweet pickle in the chow-chow register, meant to be eaten in spoonfuls beside cold meat. It can be reduced by a third without affecting keeping quality, since the acid does the preserving.
- StorageRather than a stone jar in the pantry, pack into clean jars and refrigerate; it will keep for months. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for pickles rather than relying on "closely covered."
Yellow pickle is the American descendant of the British "Indian pickle" of the eighteenth century — chopped vegetables in turmeric-stained, mustard-heavy vinegar, itself an English attempt at the mango achar that came home with the East India trade. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree in the late 1870s, the formula had settled into the Southern repertoire under the names yellow pickle, chow-chow and piccalilli, and it survived because it solved a problem: late cabbage was cheap and abundant, and a sweet-sour spiced pickle turned it into a relish that would sit on the table all winter beside salt pork and cold roasts. The book's habit of printing two or three versions of a dish over different contributors' initials — here Mrs. W. H. M.'s long-boiled version and Mrs. J. C. W.'s "quick way" — reflects its origin as a collection of household receipts gathered from a large number of Virginia housewives rather than one cook's method.