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Piccalilli
4 dozen small cucumbers 2 heads cabbage 1 teaspoon ginger 3 quarts small green string beans 4 red peppers 4 green peppers 1/4 cup mustard seed vinegar 2 heads cauliflower 1 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon mace Tie spices in a muslin bag. Chop the vegetables, cover with salt and water, let stand over night. Drain thoroughly, cover with hot vinegar, add spice bag, and let stand until the next morning. Reheat vinegar and pour over pickles; do this for three days, then keep in earthen crock tightly covered.
This is a farmhouse-scale mixed pickle: as written it fills a five-gallon crock. Everything below assumes you will cut it down and finish it in jars rather than in an open crock.
- ScaleFour dozen cucumbers, two cabbages, two cauliflowers and three quarts of beans yields something in the region of 20 to 25 pints. A quarter of the recipe is a manageable batch for a single large stockpot.
- The vinegar is unmeasuredThe list simply says "vinegar," and the method wants enough to cover the drained vegetables. Use cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity and enough of it to keep the vegetables submerged; do not dilute it, since the acid is what preserves the pickle.
- "+ cup mustard seed"The fraction has dropped out of the text in this printing. Piccalilli recipes of the period vary widely in how much white mustard seed they call for, and the original figure here is genuinely unrecoverable.
- The overnight saltingNo salt proportion is given. A strong pickling brine, on the order of a third to a half cup of pickling or kosher salt per quart of water, is one reasonable reading. Avoid iodized table salt, which can cloud or darken the liquid, and drain and press the vegetables hard the next day or the finished pickle will be watery.
- Spice bagThe teaspoon quantities of ginger, pepper and mace suggest ground spices, which is one reason to tie them in muslin rather than stir them in loose; ground spice left free will make the vinegar muddy and dark. Mace is the dried aril of the nutmeg, warmer and less resinous than the seed itself.
- The three-day repetitionDraining, reboiling and re-pouring the vinegar for three days gradually drives acid into dense vegetables like cauliflower stem and green bean without cooking them to mush. It is the hinge of the recipe: skip a day and the interiors stay bland and crunchy in an unpleasant, raw way.
- PeppersThe recipe does not say whether these were sweet or hot peppers. Seed and derib them, and expect a milder, sweeter result from bells.
- StorageAn earthen crock "tightly covered" was a cool-cellar arrangement, and antique glazed crocks may carry lead in the glaze. Pack the finished pickle into clean canning jars instead, top with hot vinegar to cover, and either refrigerate or process according to current tested guidance for pickles. Keep everything submerged; anything above the vinegar line will mold.
Piccalilli is generally traced to the eighteenth-century English "India pickle," a chopped mixed pickle made with mustard and turmeric in imitation of the pickles and chutneys encountered through the East India trade; the odd name is generally traced to that period and has no settled etymology. By the time this book was printed some American versions had moved toward the plain vinegar-and-mustard-seed formula seen here, though many kept the turmeric, and in New England piccalilli was a common relish for baked beans, cold meat and chowder. Its presence in Lowney's Cook Book — a volume issued by a Massachusetts chocolate manufacturer and largely remembered for its confectionery — is a reminder that promotional cookbooks of the era often ran to something like a complete household manual, preserving chapter and all, before they got around to selling you cocoa.