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Pickled Cauliflower
1/4 pound of English mustard, 2 tablespoonfuls of mustard seed, 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 ounce of turmeric, 1½ gallon of vinegar, 1 gill of salad oil, 3 good-sized heads of cauliflower.
Boil the cauliflower until tender, and divide it into flow- - 1
A mustard pickle of the piccalilli family, built on dry English mustard, turmeric and a large quantity of vinegar. The ingredient list survives more clearly than the method, so treat the proportions as the useful part.
- The mustard quantity is incompleteThe line opens with "pound of English mustard" and the fraction in front of it is missing. For three heads of cauliflower a quarter-pound of dry mustard is the plausible reading, but the original number cannot be recovered from the text as it stands.
- English mustard means the dry powderNot prepared mustard from a jar; a pound of it, listed alongside separate mustard seed, indicates the fine yellow powder sold as Colman's or similar. The recipe's method is cut off, but dry mustard is usually slaked with a little cold vinegar to a smooth paste before the rest is added, to avoid lumps.
- A gillFour fluid ounces (half a cup) by American measure; the imperial gill is five fluid ounces, and the recipe gives no way to tell which is meant. The salad oil would be a bland vegetable or light olive oil.
- Half an ounce of turmericRoughly two tablespoons of ground turmeric. It is doing colour work as much as flavour, and it will stain wooden spoons and plastic bowls permanently.
- A gallon and a half of vinegar is a great dealThat is six quarts against three heads of cauliflower, which suggests a batch meant to fill a crock rather than a few jars. Scaled proportionally, one head would take two quarts of vinegar and a third of the other quantities.
- Do not boil the cauliflower tenderThe recipe says to boil the cauliflower until tender -- This is the single surviving instruction, and it will give a soft pickle. If you want florets that stay firm, blanch them briefly in salted water and cool them in ice water instead, though this is a departure from what the text directs.
- StorageWith the method truncated, treat anything you make as a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a month. For shelf-stable jars, work from a current tested pickling recipe with specified acidity and processing time.
Mustard pickles of this type were standard winter storekeeping in Britain and North America through the nineteenth century: a firm vegetable, blanched, held in vinegar sharpened with dry mustard and coloured with turmeric. The family includes piccalilli, chow-chow and the various "mixed pickles" that used up the last of the garden, and the yellow they share owes much to the turmeric, though dry mustard is itself yellow and English mustard powder often contains turmeric of its own. Cauliflower was a favourite candidate because it holds its shape and takes the sauce well, and because a glut of heads ripening at once had to be dealt with somehow, whether by pickling or by cellaring. The salad oil is the older touch here.