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Chow Chow
1 medium-sized cauliflower 12 green peppers 12 cucumbers (small) 2 cups small onions 2 cups salt 4 cups vinegar 1 teaspoon cayenne 2 quarts boiling water 3 tablespoons mustard Peel onions and cook twenty minutes. Drain and cool. Arrange cauliflower, broken in small pieces, cucumbers, peppers, and onions in kettle. Cover with brine made of salt and water. Let stand two days. Drain thoroughly, then cover with vinegar, cayenne, and mustard. Boil slowly one hour. Keep in Mason or Lightning jars.
A mixed vinegar pickle of the old style, salted down for two days before it ever meets the vinegar. Two things need attention: the brine is far stronger than anything a modern recipe calls for, and the finished jars are not given any processing.
- The brine is a cure, not a seasoningTwo cups of salt to two quarts of water is roughly a 20 percent brine, close to saturation. It firms the vegetables and draws out water, but the drained pieces will be aggressively salty. A rinse in cold water after draining, and a taste, is worth the trouble before the vinegar goes on.
- Vinegar strengthUse plain distilled white or cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Anything labelled below that, or a wine vinegar of unstated strength, will not carry a pickle of this size.
- Mustard means dry mustardThree tablespoons of mustard here is almost certainly powdered mustard rather than prepared. Slake it with a little of the vinegar into a paste first or it will sit in lumps on the surface.
- An hour is a long boilBoiled a full hour, the cucumbers go translucent and slack and the cauliflower begins to fall apart. Twenty to thirty minutes at a bare simmer gives vegetables that still have some resistance, which is what most people want from chow chow now.
- Use a non-reactive kettleHot vinegar attacks aluminum, cast iron and bare copper, picking up metal and a grey cast. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron only.
- Lightning jarsA Lightning jar is the glass-lidded jar with a wire bail and rubber ring. Replacement rings can be hard to source and are of uncertain quality; use standard two-piece canning lids on modern jars.
- Storage is not addressedThe recipe stops at filling the jars, with no boiling-water bath and no seal test, which was ordinary open-kettle practice of the period and is not now. Either refrigerate the jars and eat within a couple of months, or follow a current tested pickle procedure for water-bath times if you want shelf storage.
- YieldTwelve small cucumbers and twelve green peppers is a large batch by modern standards; the proportions halve cleanly.
Chow chow is the English-language catch-all for a mixed, mustard-tinged pickle, and the name is generally traced to the pidgin trade English of the China coast, where chow-chow meant a mixture or medley; Anglo-Indian cookery used it the same way for mixed sweet pickles and preserves. By the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had settled it firmly onto the vegetable pickle, and regional versions varied: cabbage and green tomato in the South, cauliflower and cucumber with mustard elsewhere, as here. A full preserving section covering the September glut of peppers, cucumbers and small onions was a standard feature of general household cookbooks of the period. The two-day salting is the older technique the recipe preserves: before reliable refrigeration, drawing water out of the vegetables was what kept a pickle crisp and kept it from diluting the vinegar.