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A Good Relish-Uncooked
Mrs. H. T. Mason. 3 C cabbage, chopped fine 1 C sweet pickles 1/2 green pepper ½ t salt 2-3 C onion Place in jars and cover with parafine. ½ C sugar in one cup vinegar
This is a raw vegetable relish put into jars and sealed under melted paraffin, a preserving method that was ordinary in church cookbooks of this era and is no longer considered safe. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a corrected version.
- The paraffin seal is the problemPoured wax was used to cap jams and jellies, where high sugar or high acid did the actual preserving. It is not a hermetic seal, it shrinks and cracks as it cools, and it does nothing to sterilise the contents. Here it is being asked to preserve raw, low-acid vegetables at room temperature.
- Cabbage, onion and pepper are low-acidNothing in this recipe is cooked, and the acid present is a small amount of vinegar diluted through three-plus cups of vegetables and a cup and a half of sugar. The finished pH is unknown and almost certainly above 4.6, the threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Under wax, the jar tends toward the oxygen-poor conditions that organism prefers.
- No heat step anywhereThere is no boiling of the brine, no hot-pack, no processing in a water bath. Whatever is on the raw cabbage and onions goes into the jar alive, and the sugar-vinegar mixture is not strong enough to stop it.
- "12 t salt" cannot be read with confidenceTwelve teaspoons of salt against three cups of cabbage is far beyond seasoning. It is most likely a typesetting slip for 1/2 t or 1 1/2 t, but the original does not say, and salt is precisely the ingredient that would matter to preservation here.
- "2-3 C onion" is equally unclearA hyphen in a transcription of this kind can stand in for a mangled fraction, so this may be 2/3 cup rather than a range of two to three cups. The difference is between a seasoning and a bulk ingredient.
- The vinegar strength is unstatedHousehold vinegar of this period varied considerably in acetic acid content, and cider vinegar sold from a barrel could be weaker than the 5 percent standard bottled vinegar sold today. Any acid calculation based on this recipe rests on an unknown.
- If you want a relish like thisUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, or treat a small batch as a refrigerator relish to be eaten within a few days. Do not seal it with wax and do not store it on a shelf.
Community cookbooks compiled by church societies, like this one from the Libertyville Presbyterian congregation, were a common way for members to gather and circulate recipes and to raise money. Something in how this one came together explains both the recipe's charm and its faults: the ingredient list runs in whatever order Mrs. Mason wrote it, the sugar-and-vinegar dressing arrives after the instruction to fill the jars, and at least two of the quantities appear to have been garbled somewhere along the way. The dish itself belongs to the large American family of chopped cabbage relishes -- chow-chow, piccalilli, cabbage salad, pepper hash -- that turned the end of the garden into something to eat with cold meat through the winter. Sealing jars with melted paraffin was standard practice at the time and was recommended in print for decades; the understanding that it is inadequate for anything but high-acid or high-sugar preserves came later, as home canning research through the twentieth century established the acidity and processing thresholds now taken for granted.