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Piccalilli
1 red pepper. 1½ teacup salt 1 Faye Ree.
1/2 pk. green tomatoes. 1 large head cabbage. 2 green peppers. Chop and mix and drain in colander over night. In the morning cover with vinegar and let it boil until soft. Then drain off vinegar, and put in a small cloth bag tied loosely. 1 small T mustard 1 t allspice 1 t cinnamon Add 1 lb. sugar and 2 large onions to vegetable mixture, cover with vinegar, include the bag of spices, and let boil a few minutes. Seal while hot.
Mrs. Allie T. Nicholas.
This is a community-cookbook contribution recorded in shorthand, and the page as printed has lost the one thing it most needs: the vegetable the relish is made of. That, combined with an open-kettle sealing method, is why it cannot be followed today.
- The main ingredient is missing"1 Faye Ree" is a garbled line where the bulk vegetable and its quantity should be; American piccalilli of this period was commonly built on green tomatoes or cabbage, but neither the vegetable nor its amount can be recovered here. Everything after it, the 1½ teacups of salt and the pound of sugar, is proportioned to a quantity the reader cannot recover, so the salt and acid ratios of the finished relish are unknowable.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal while hot" means ladling boiling relish into jars and screwing the lids down, trusting the cooling vacuum. It was standard until the mid-twentieth century and is no longer considered adequate: the headspace and lid rim are not sterilised, and the seal often fails weeks later without visible signs. Pickles today are processed in a boiling-water bath for a measured time.
- No processing time or temperatureThe recipe gives "let boil a few minutes" and nothing else — no jar preparation, no headspace, no bath time. For a shelf-stable canned product those numbers are the recipe, not a detail, and they cannot be supplied by guesswork when the ingredient quantities are also unclear. Use a current tested piccalilli recipe instead.
- The vinegar is unquantified twice"Cover with vinegar" appears in both stages, and period vinegar was not standardised to today's 5 percent acetic acid. Since the acidity of the pack is what makes a pickle safe at room temperature, an uncontrolled "cover with" is not a usable instruction for canning.
- Reading the abbreviationsFor the record: capital T is a tablespoon and lowercase t a teaspoon, so the spice bag holds about a tablespoon of dry mustard with a teaspoon each of allspice and cinnamon. A teacup in books of this kind is usually smaller than a full cup — often given as about 6 fluid ounces — but the measure was not standardised.
- The two-stage vinegarThe method is period practice worth noting: the vegetables are salted overnight to draw water, boiled once in vinegar that is then discarded, then boiled again in fresh vinegar with the sugar and spice bag. Discarding the first vinegar would carry off the salt and vegetable liquor that might otherwise dilute and cloud the finished pickle, though the recipe gives no reason.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens in the eighteenth century as "India pickle" or "paco-lilla," a mustard-and-turmeric pickle made in imitation of the sharp mixed achars encountered through the East India trade; the name is usually connected to that borrowing, though its origin is not settled. British piccalilli stayed yellow with mustard and turmeric and kept its cauliflower in large pieces, while American versions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drifted toward a finely chopped sweet relish, often built on the green tomatoes that a frost left behind on the vines. The missing line here may have called for those, but there is no way to know. A compiled community cookbook of this kind records what its contributors actually put up, contributed under the maker's married name and printed much as she wrote it — which is also why the measurements are in teacups and the instructions assume the reader has done it before.