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India Relish
1 teaspoonful cinnamon 1 teaspoonful turmeric 1 saltspoonful cloves 12 medium sized cucumbers Salt 1 pint (2 cups) vinegar 1/2 pint (I cup) water 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 saltspoonful allspice 1 pint (2 cups) hot vinegar 2 tablespoonfuls white mustard seeds 2 tablespoonfuls powdered mint Slice the tomatoes and remove as many of the seeds as possible. Take the seeds also from the peppers and chop them with the onions. Slice the cucumbers into a stoneware jar. Cover them with salt and let them stand for twenty-four hours. Drain, pour the cold vinegar and one cupful of water over them, bring slowly to a scald, and drain again. Mix the sugar, cinnamon, turmeric, cloves, and allspice together with a little cold vinegar. Put the mustard seeds, spices, and vegetables into the hot vinegar and boil for twenty-five minutes, stirring almost constantly. Pour into small jars, lay a nasturtium leaf over the top, and seal. 12 large lemons 1/2 cupful salt 8 garlic cloves
This page has come through the printing process badly damaged, and it also relies on a canning method that has been abandoned. Read it as a document rather than as working instructions.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe method calls for tomatoes, peppers and onions, none of which appear in the list of quantities. The list gives two separate lots of vinegar: the cold pint is poured over the salted cucumbers, the hot pint takes the spices and vegetables for the final boil. The final three lines — twelve lemons, half a cup of salt, eight garlic cloves — have no place in this method and appear to belong to a following recipe on the original page.
- Why it should not be madeA relish of tomatoes, peppers, onions and cucumbers is a low-acid mixture whose safety depends entirely on the vinegar-to-vegetable ratio, and that ratio cannot be established from this text. Improperly acidified home-canned vegetables are the classic vehicle for Clostridium botulinum, which thrives in a sealed, oxygen-free jar.
- Open-kettle sealingPouring boiling relish into jars and sealing them, with no boiling-water bath afterwards, was ordinary practice in household books of this era and is no longer accepted. The jar rim, the lid and the headspace are never brought to temperature, and seals formed this way fail silently. Use a current tested pickle recipe with a stated processing time.
- The nasturtium leafLaying a leaf over the surface was a finishing touch of the same household-lore kind as grape leaves in cucumber pickles. It contributes nothing to preservation and adds unsterilised plant material to a sealed jar.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. The measure survives in old books because the small spoon sat on the table beside the open salt dish.
- Stoneware jarThe twenty-four-hour salting is done in glazed stoneware because salt and vinegar attack bare metal. A glass or food-grade plastic vessel serves the same purpose; unglazed or antique glazed crockery of unknown origin should not be used for food.
- Powdered mint and white mustard seedPowdered mint means dried mint rubbed fine, not extract. White mustard seed is the pale yellow seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed, milder than the brown.
"India" attached to a relish in an American or British cookbook of this period rarely signals an Indian recipe; it signals turmeric, mustard seed and the sweet-sour spicing that came home with the Anglo-Indian taste for chutney and mango pickle. Green mangoes were hard to come by in most Northern kitchens, and cucumbers, green tomatoes and onions are often said to have stood in for them, with the yellow colour that readers associated with the East coming from turmeric rather than from anything in the vegetables. Recipes of this kind cluster in the pickle chapters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books, where the salting-and-scalding sequence seen here — twenty-four hours under dry salt, then a scald in vinegar, then a long boil with spices — appears to have been one common way of firming watery summer vegetables before they went into jars. The nasturtium leaf laid on top belongs to the same tradition of household lore that put grape leaves in cucumber pickles and a coin in the preserving pan.