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Pickled Radish Pods
Pick two quarts of horse-radish pods. They must be tender, green, and with the seeds just forming. Throw them in brine and stand aside over night. Next day turn them, brine and all, into a porcelain kettle and bring to steaming point. Drain, turn them into a jar, and if not tender and green bring the brine to boiling point and pour over the pods again. Continue doing this till the pods are tender and green. Then drain, put one quart of good cider vinegar in a porcelain kettle, add two blades of mace, one ounce of ginger root in slices, two small red peppers, two tablespoonfuls of chopped horse-radish; bring to boiling point and pour over the pods. Stand aside over night. Next morning drain off the vinegar, bring it to boiling point again and pour over the pods. When cold they may be tied up and kept in a cool dry place.
A vinegar pickle of green seed pods, made by the old open-kettle method: repeated scalding rather than any measured processing. A few of its terms and assumptions need translating.
- Which podsHorseradish very rarely sets usable seed pods, and the title of the entry gives the game away: these are ordinary radish seed pods, picked while still green, plump and soft, before the seeds harden. Rat-tail radish is grown specifically for them, but any bolted radish in the garden will produce a crop.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamel-lined iron pan, specified because vinegar and salt attack bare iron, copper and (in period) tin. Any non-reactive pan — stainless, enamel, or glass — does the same job.
- The brine is unmeasuredThe recipe assumes a cook who knows what "brine" means. Nineteenth-century pickling brine ran strong, though figures vary from book to book and are more often given by feel than by weight; since this book gives no figure at all, treat the quantity as genuinely unspecified rather than guessing at it.
- Steaming point, not boilingThe pods are brought only to steaming point and then drained; the book gives no temperature. Boiling them outright collapses the pods and dulls the colour. The repeated scald-and-drain cycle is what softens them while keeping them green, and the recipe tells you to continue until they are tender and green rather than fixing a number of rounds.
- Mace and gingerMace is the lacy aril of the nutmeg, dried and sold in blades; about half a teaspoonful of ground mace is the nearest substitute for two blades, though it will cloud the vinegar. An ounce of sliced ginger root is a piece roughly the size of a thumb.
- Vinegar strength"Good cider vinegar" in this period meant undiluted and sharp. Use a commercial cider vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity and do not cut it with water — the acid is doing all the preserving work here.
- Storage"Tied up" means a paper or bladder cover over a crock, not a sealed jar, and "cool dry place" meant a cellar at cellar temperature. Since nothing here is heat-processed and no seal is made, keep the finished pickle in the refrigerator and use it within a few weeks; for anything shelf-stable, follow a current tested canning recipe.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. These are a condiment — served like capers, alongside cold meat or boiled beef — rather than a vegetable dish.
Pickled radish pods were a standing item in English and American household books from the eighteenth century onward, valued chiefly as a home-grown stand-in for capers, which had to be imported and were priced accordingly. Any radish left to bolt gives them, so the pickle was a way of taking a second crop from a plant that had already gone past eating — the same thrift that produced pickled nasturtium seeds and pickled samphire. The green colour was a point of pride, and the repeated hot-brine treatment here is the respectable version of a technique that in less careful kitchens involved scalding the pods in a copper pan or adding a pinch of alum, both of which greened vegetables by means no cook would use now. The confusion of "horse-radish pods" with radish pods turns up in nineteenth-century books, this entry among them; horseradish is propagated from root cuttings and seldom seeds, and the chopped horseradish added to the spiced vinegar is doing the work its name suggests.