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Corn Relish
Fannie Grinnell. 12 ears sweet corn 1 medium head of cabbage 3 red or green peppers 12 onions 3 T ground mustard 2 T tuemric powder ¼ C salt Chop all together. Then add }ch 3 pts. vinegar 1 C sugar Boil twenty minutes and seal while hot.
Mrs. Geo. Smith.
A straightforward chopped corn relish of the sort put up by the bushel in late summer. The measurements are terse and one of them is ambiguous, so read the whole thing before you start.
- AbbreviationsT is tablespoon and C is cup. "3 pts. vinegar" is 6 cups; use cider or distilled white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is what modern bottles carry.
- The salt figure"14 C salt" cannot be right for this quantity of vegetables and is almost certainly a quarter cup. Even a quarter cup of table salt is assertive against roughly 12 ears of corn and a head of cabbage; start with two tablespoons and correct at the end of the boil.
- TuemricTurmeric, which is here for color rather than flavor. Two tablespoons will turn the whole batch the familiar bright yellow of commercial corn relish and will stain a wooden spoon permanently.
- Cutting the cornThe recipe does not say whether the ears are cooked first; as written the kernels appear to go in raw. Twelve ears gives roughly 6 to 9 cups of kernels. Run the back of the knife down the stripped cob to collect the milky pulp, which thickens the relish.
- Chop, do not puree"Chop all together" would most likely have meant a hand chopper or food grinder. A food processor will reduce cabbage and onion to slush in seconds; pulse in batches or chop by hand so the relish keeps some texture.
- Twenty minutes is enoughTwenty minutes is a short boil. Longer cooking softens the corn kernels and dulls the pepper; the relish thickens further as it cools.
- Sealing"Seal while hot" is open-kettle canning, in which the hot jar is expected to pull its own vacuum. That method is no longer considered reliable. Either treat this as a refrigerator relish, keeping it covered and cold for a month or so, or process the filled jars by a current tested boiling-water schedule for pickled corn relish.
- YieldNo yield is given; with this quantity of vegetables plus 6 cups of vinegar, expect appreciably more than a few pints -- a full afternoon's work and a canner's worth of jars.
Corn relish belongs to the American end-of-summer preserving season, when sweet corn, cabbage, onions and peppers all come in at once and a cook with a chopping bowl could turn a glut into winter condiment. The mustard-and-turmeric formula is close to the one that made commercial chow-chow and piccalilli yellow, and variations on it are common in compiled community cookbooks of the period, each credited to a different contributor. The two names attached here point to a collection of submitted recipes, which would explain the shorthand -- no pan size, no jar count, no explanation of how finely to chop.