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Pickled Cabbage and Celery
2 quarts chopped cabbage 1 cup sugar + cup celery seed 2 quarts chopped celery cup salt 1/4 cup mustard seed 3 quarts vinegar Cook all ingredients until cabbage is tender. Keep in stone crock.
Pickled Cucumbers No. 2 100 cucumbers sliced 30 small onions sliced salt olive oil vinegar mustard seed Arrange cucumbers and salt in layers and let stand over night. Arrange onions and salt in layers and let stand over night. In the morning drain; put a layer of cucumbers in an earthen crock, cover with olive oil and mustard, then a layer of onions, and so continue until all are used. Cover whole with cider vinegar; let stand covered closely for two months, when it is ready for use.
Two pickle recipes have been run together on this page, and they are very different propositions. The first is a cooked, heavily vinegared relish in the chow-chow family; the second is a raw, oil-layered cucumber pickle held at room temperature for two months, and that one should not be attempted.
- Why the cucumber pickle failsRaw vegetables submerged under a layer of olive oil create exactly the oxygen-free, low-acid pocket in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. Onions and garlic held in oil are a documented botulism vector, and nothing here is heated, acidified to a measured pH, or refrigerated. Two months at room temperature is the whole problem, not an incidental detail.
- Unmeasured salt and vinegarThe cucumber recipe lists salt, oil, vinegar and mustard seed with no quantities at all. Safe pickling depends on a known acid concentration reaching every part of the jar; "cover whole with cider vinegar" over an oil cap does not guarantee that. Use a current tested pickle recipe with weighed salt and a stated vinegar strength.
- The garbled measurements in the first recipeThe transcription reads "+ cup celery seed" and "cup salt" where the original almost certainly printed fractions. A quarter cup of celery seed for four quarts of vegetables is plausible; a full cup is not. Treat both as unreadable rather than guessing.
- Stone crock storageAn unglazed or glazed stoneware crock in a cold cellar was the period's default larder. A modern kitchen has no equivalent. The cabbage-and-celery relish, once cooked, belongs in the refrigerator in glass and should be eaten within a few weeks.
- Cooking the cabbage relishThe recipe gives no time, only "until cabbage is tender," which at a gentle simmer in the vinegar is likely to be a matter of twenty minutes or more. The mixture stays quite loose; the sugar and vinegar do the preserving work, not reduction.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar was not standardised, and its acetic acid content varied widely and was often unknown, so it cannot be assumed to match the 5 percent sold today.
- ScaleOne hundred cucumbers and thirty onions is a cellar-filling batch meant to feed a household through winter.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other branded cookbooks of the era it surrounded its chocolate formulas with a general household repertoire — soups, roasts, and a long preserving section. Pickles of this type, chopped cabbage and celery bound with mustard and celery seed, sit in the American chow-chow and piccalilli tradition; piccalilli is usually linked to British colonial adaptations of Indian mixed pickles, though the derivation of "chow-chow" itself is disputed. By 1900 such pickles were thoroughly domesticated as a way to use up the end of the garden. The second recipe, with its hundred cucumbers and its oil-and-vinegar layering in an earthen crock, belongs to an older and riskier practice: putting food down in bulk for the winter in an unheated cellar, on the strength of salt, acid and cold alone. That such a method appears in a printed cookbook of the period is a reminder that home preserving guidance was largely traditional until state and federal extension services began testing and publishing measured procedures in the following decades.