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Mixed Pickles
1 gallon vinegar. ¼ lb. bruised ginger ¼ lb. mustard seed ¼ lb. salt 1 oz. black pepper ¼ oz. red pepper ¼ lb. unmixed mustard 2 ozs. turmeric Vegetables in season ¼ oz. mace Take a large earthenware jar or casserole that will hold two gallons, and put the vinegar into it; add the ginger and mustard seeds. Pound together the salt, peppers, mace, mustard, and turmeric. Make them into a paste by adding a little vinegar, then add it to the vinegar in the jar, taking care to mix it thoroughly.
Cover the jar tightly, and keep it in a warm place for a month, stirring it every day with a wooden spoon. Gather different vegetables as they come in season, and prepare them by cutting them into neat pieces and scalding them in strong brine, which should be boiling hot. The different pieces must be drained and left to get quite dry before putting them into the pickle. When all the vegetables that are wished for are added, put the pickles into earthenware jars or dishes and cover carefully so as to exclude the air.
This is a Victorian-style "Indian pickle" master jar: a spiced vinegar brew that is left to mature for a month and then fed with vegetables through the growing season. As printed it cannot be followed safely, and the reasons are worth understanding.
- The vinegar has no quantityThe method opens by telling you to put "the vinegar" into a two-gallon jar, but no volume and no strength appear anywhere in the ingredient list. Acidity is the only thing preserving this pickle, and there is no way to reconstruct it from the text.
- Nothing is ever heated in the jarThe vegetables are scalded in brine, dried, and then dropped cold into cold spiced vinegar. There is no boiling, no processing and no seal — only the vinegar stands between the contents and spoilage organisms, including Clostridium botulinum in low-acid vegetables such as beans, cauliflower stalk and onion, of the kind a mixed pickle of this sort would have taken.
- A month in a warm placeThe maturing jar is deliberately kept warm and stirred daily with an open lid lifted each time. Warm storage of an unmeasured acid solution, repeatedly opened, is the opposite of what current home-preserving guidance calls for.
- "Cover so as to exclude the air" is not a sealPeriod covers meant a bladder, paper and paste, or a cloth and wax. None of these produce the vacuum seal that modern preserving depends on, and excluding air does not help against anaerobic hazards.
- If you want mixed picklesUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength, a stated ratio of vinegar to vegetable, and a processing time. Do not attempt to patch this one.
- Reading the quantitiesThe fractions have not survived printing: the ginger, mustard seed, salt, unmixed mustard, red pepper and mace were all quarter measures — quarter pounds for the first four, quarter ounces for the last two. "Unmixed mustard" is dry mustard powder, not the prepared condiment.
- Vessels"Casserole" here means a large earthenware crock, not a covered baking dish; the two-gallon capacity is the point. "Strong brine" in this period meant a heavily salted solution, commonly tested by whether it would float an egg.
Mixed pickle of this kind descends from the eighteenth-century British taste for what cookery books called Indian pickle or piccalilli — the turmeric, ginger, mustard and cayenne are a domesticated echo of the achar brought back through the East India trade, and the yellow colour that turmeric gives is the signature of the whole family. The method here belongs to a particular kind of household economy: rather than making a batch of one pickle, the cook establishes a standing crock of spiced vinegar in spring and adds to it through the year as cauliflower, beans, small onions, cucumber and green tomatoes come in, so that a single jar carries the garden into winter.