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Mixed-Pickle Dressing
6 tablespoons mustard 1 tablespoon turmeric 1 cup flour 2 cups sugar 2 quarts vinegar Mix the ingredients thoroughly and cook until thick. Stir in the pickles; heat thoroughly; empty into glass jars and stand away until needed.
This is the sauce half of an old-style mustard (chow-chow) pickle: a thick turmeric-yellow mustard gravy that the drained, brined vegetables are stirred into. The mixing is straightforward; the problem is the last sentence, which treats a flour-thickened product as shelf-stable.
- Why it fails as writtenThe pickles are heated in the dressing, jarred hot and simply "stood away" — open-kettle canning with no boiling-water process and no measured processing time. Nothing in the method brings the sealed jar contents to a temperature that reliably destroys mold and yeast, and the seal itself depends on chance.
- The flour is the specific obstacleCurrent home-canning guidance excludes flour- and starch-thickened products from tested processes, because thickening slows heat penetration and the cold spot at the jar's centre cannot be predicted. Even a modestly thickened dressing like this one falls outside those tested processes, so a modern tested recipe should be used instead.
- Vinegar strength is unstatedThe acidity of the finished dressing is the only preservative here, and the recipe never says what vinegar to use. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household vinegars ranged widely in strength; the same volume of a weak cider vinegar and of modern 5 percent white vinegar give very different finished pH, and there is no way to reconstruct which Mrs. Fryer meant.
- "Mustard" means dry mustardSix tablespoons of powdered yellow mustard, not prepared table mustard. Turmeric is likewise the dry ground spice, used as much for the colour as the flavour — it is what makes chow-chow yellow.
- The scale is institutionalThe scale is large -- two quarts of vinegar and two cups of sugar make a great deal of dressing, far more than a small batch would need. The recipe itself never says how much vegetable it is meant to coat.
- The pickles are assumed, not described"Stir in the pickles" presupposes vegetables already prepared and drained elsewhere. The dressing on its own is not a recipe for a finished preserve.
Mustard pickle, chow-chow and piccalilli are overlapping and often related names in the preserving repertoire, though they are not simply interchangeable: chow-chow in much of North America is a cabbage-and-tomato relish rather than mixed garden vegetables held in a mustard-and-turmeric sauce thickened with flour. That flour-thickened mustard pickle is a British colonial idea generally traced to Indian-influenced mixed pickles and thoroughly domesticated in American and Canadian kitchens by the late 1800s. The loose-leaf format of Mrs. Fryer's book allowed its owner to insert, remove and replace pages at will. The confident brevity of "stand away until needed" is characteristic of the period, when the reliability of a preserve was judged by whether it spoiled rather than by any measurement.