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Mustard Pickle
1 cup chopped green pepper 2 tablespoons turmeric 1 pint button onions 4 cups sliced cucumbers 4 cups sliced green tomatoes 4 cups cauliflower flowerets 2 tablespoons celery seed Boil vinegar, spices, and sugar five minutes, add remaining ingredients, and simmer until thick. Keep in crock in cool place.
This entry is printed incomplete: the ingredient list gives the vegetables and two spices, but the vinegar, sugar, salt and the mustard that names the pickle never appear with quantities. Those omissions are the reason it cannot be followed.
- The missing acid is the problemThe method says "boil vinegar, spices, and sugar" but no volume or strength of vinegar is given anywhere. A pickle's safety in long storage rests entirely on its acidity, and there is no way to know from this text what the finished acidity would be.
- No mustard, despite the nameA mustard pickle is defined by a thickened mustard-and-turmeric sauce, usually dry mustard and flour worked into vinegar. Neither is listed here, which is why the instruction to "simmer until thick" has nothing to thicken it.
- No salt, no brining stepPeriod mustard pickle recipes commonly begin with the cut vegetables standing overnight in brine to draw out water. No such step and no salt quantity appear here, so the vegetables would release liquid into the sauce and dilute whatever acid is present.
- Open-crock storage"Keep in crock in cool place" describes an unsealed vessel held above refrigeration temperature for weeks or months. Without verified acidity and a sealed, processed jar, that is surface mould and spoilage territory at best.
- If you want the dishUse a current tested recipe for mustard pickle or chow-chow, one that specifies vinegar of stated acidity, salt weight, and a processing time. Do not attempt to reconstruct the missing amounts here.
- Reading the vegetablesFor interest only: a pint of button onions is roughly a pound of the small pickling sort, and "cauliflower flowerets" means the head broken into small florets. Turmeric at two tablespoons is a colouring quantity as much as a flavouring one.
Mustard pickle belongs to the large family of mixed sweet-sour vegetable relishes -- piccalilli, chow-chow, Indian pickle -- that reached American kitchens by way of British colonial cookery, where the turmeric and mustard are usually said to signal an approximation of Indian achar. By the turn of the twentieth century it was standard late-summer preserving work, a way of using the green tomatoes and small cucumbers left when the season broke. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book reflects the ambitions of the promotional cookbook: the Walter M. Lowney Company sold chocolate, but a book bearing its name was expected to cover the whole household year, preserving section included. The ingredient list as it comes down to us here is truncated, a good reminder that a printed recipe is not always a complete one.