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Piccalilli
Take one-half peck green tomatoes, two cabbages, nine onions, twelve cucumbers, six green peppers and one-quarter pound mustard seed. Chop all very fine. Make a strong brine of salt water, and boil the chopped piccalilli in it for about five minutes. Remove from the fire, and press out every drop of the brine; then mix in the mustard seed, and put all in a stone crock. Boil a gallon of pickling vinegar, and pour over hot. It may be used as soon as cold.
A large-batch green tomato relish of the fresh-pack sort: salted and blanched, drained hard, then covered with boiling vinegar. Nothing here is processed for shelf storage, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle rather than a pantry one.
- Half a peck of green tomatoesA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts, roughly 6 to 7 lb of green tomatoes. The cabbages are undefined; assume two ordinary heads of about 2 lb each.
- Total yieldThe full batch is very large; the chopped vegetables run to well over a dozen pounds, and with a gallon of vinegar poured over, the finished relish fills several quarts. Quartering it is sensible unless you are feeding a boarding house.
- Strong brinePeriod cookbooks often gauged a strong brine by whether it would float an egg, which is in the region of a pound of salt to the gallon of water. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodized salt can cloud the liquid and darken the vegetables.
- Press out every dropThis is the hinge. Water left in the vegetables dilutes the vinegar and turns the relish slack and watery. Drain in a colander, then wring the mixture in a cloth or press it under a weighted plate.
- Quarter pound mustard seedAbout 3/4 cup of whole yellow mustard seed. It goes in raw, after the brining, so it stays crunchy and its heat develops slowly in the crock.
- Pickling vinegarIn period usage, vinegar sold strong for pickling, sometimes already spiced; the guaranteed 5 percent acetic acid of modern bottled vinegar is a later standard. Ordinary distilled white vinegar at 5 percent is the practical equivalent. Do not substitute anything of unstated or lower acidity.
- Stone crockSome old glazed wares, earthenware especially, can carry lead in the glaze, and vinegar will draw it out. If the piece is antique or of unknown origin, use glass jars or a food-grade plastic or stainless container instead.
- StorageBoiling vinegar poured over cold vegetables is not a canning process; the jars are neither sealed nor heat-processed. Refrigerate and eat within a couple of months. For a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested recipe with a measured boiling-water process.
- ColorUnlike British piccalilli, this has no turmeric or mustard flour, so it stays pale green rather than yellow, and the texture is chopped and loose rather than bound in a sauce.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens in the eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian pickle; the name's origin is uncertain, though it is often linked to forms like paco-lilla, which appears in eighteenth-century recipe books for an "Indian pickle" of vegetables in brine, mustard and turmeric. The British version thickened into a yellow mustard sauce clinging to cauliflower and onion, while in America the name commonly attaches to a chopped relish, often built on green tomatoes, the reliable surplus of a frost-threatened September garden. A jar of something sharp on the table did much to make plain boiled or baked food palatable meal after meal.