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West Indian Pickles
4 green peppers 2 red peppers 1 head celery Chop (not too fine), salt and let stand over night. Cook in brine for ten minutes, then drain well.
1 head cauliflower. 1 C cucumber. 1 C onion. 4 green tomatoes. Sauce 1 qt. cider vinegar 5 T mustard 3 C brown sugar 1 t celery seed 1 to 2 lobes of garlic 1/2 t tumeric powder 1 T white mustard seed Powdered assofiedite (size of pea.) 1 C flour Boil until thick, then add pickles. Stir well. Makes one gallon and keeps without sealing. 3½ lbs. cherries 2½ lbs. sugar Mrs. Chas. Greenwood.
A mustard-and-turmeric relish of the piccalilli family, thickened with flour rather than reduced. Two things need attention before you start: the asafoetida, and the fact that the last line belongs to another recipe altogether.
- Ignore the last line"3/2 lbs. cherries 2½ lbs. sugar" appears to be a stray fragment of another recipe. It has nothing to do with these pickles.
- AssofiediteThis is asafoetida, the dried resin of a giant fennel, sold as powder or lump in Indian groceries. A pea-sized amount is roughly 1/4 teaspoon of the powder; it smells aggressively sulphurous raw and settles into an onion-garlic savouriness once cooked. It can be left out with no harm to the pickle.
- Lobes of garlicCloves. One to two cloves for a gallon of relish is very restrained by modern taste.
- AbbreviationsT is tablespoon, t teaspoon, C cup. So 5 tablespoons mustard (the recipe does not say whether dry or prepared), 3 cups brown sugar, 1 cup flour to 1 quart cider vinegar.
- The salting stepChopped peppers and celery salted overnight throw off a good deal of liquid, and that liquid is probably the "brine" they are then simmered in for ten minutes, though the recipe may equally mean a fresh salt brine. Drain hard afterwards or the sauce will thin out. Modern practice would rinse the vegetables at this point to keep the finished relish from turning aggressively salty, since the original gives no quantity of salt.
- Thickening with flourWhisk the cup of flour into a little of the cold vinegar first, then add the rest, or you will be picking lumps out. Boil it properly for a couple of minutes so the starch loses its raw taste, and stir constantly, since flour and sugar scorch quickly.
- StorageDo not rely on "keeps without sealing." A flour-thickened relish is much less stable than a clear vinegar pickle, and the starch and sugar give mould something to work with. Pack it into clean jars, refrigerate, and use it within a few weeks like a fresh relish.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks used "West Indian" and "East Indian" loosely, as a label for anything sharp, sweet and yellow with mustard and turmeric; the actual lineage of this kind of pickle runs through British piccalilli, whose name and turmeric are often said to derive from South Asian achar, though the etymology is contested. What marks the recipe as American and domestic is the flour, which stretches one quart of vinegar into a gallon of thick mustard relish. The asafoetida is the period detail worth noticing. It seems generally to have been stocked by druggists rather than grocers, sold chiefly as a medicine, and it turns up in a scattering of pickle and catsup recipes of the era where a cook wanted a savoury depth that onions alone would not give. The recipe is credited to a named contributor, Mrs. Chas. Greenwood.