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Mixed Pickle
1 quart large cucumbers cut in cubes 1 quart small cucumbers left whole 1 quart small silver-skinned onions 1 quart green tomatoes chopped coarse 2 red sweet peppers chopped fine 1 large cauliflower broken in small pieces Wash the vegetables and pour over them a weak brine solution made of a quart of water and a cup of salt. Let stand twenty-four hours; bring to a boil in same solution; drain and make the dressing.
This entry is the first half of a mixed pickle: it brines and blanches the vegetables, then hands off to a "dressing" that appears nowhere on the page. Read as a preserving recipe it is incomplete in exactly the places that matter.
- The dressing is missingEverything that would make this shelf-stable — vinegar, its strength, sugar, mustard, turmeric, flour or cornstarch for a mustard-pickle style sauce — is in the omitted step. Without a stated acid quantity there is no way to judge the finished pH.
- No processing instructionsThe recipe never says to pack hot into jars, seal, or process in a boiling-water bath for a set time. Low-acid vegetables — cauliflower, onions, sweet peppers, cucumbers — sealed in jars without sufficient acid and without heat processing are the classic conditions for Clostridium botulinum. Use a current tested pickle recipe from a food-preservation authority instead.
- The brine is not weakA cup of salt to a quart of water is a strong brine: on the order of 20 to 25 percent by weight depending on the grain of the salt, and near the limit of what will dissolve. Whatever "weak" meant to the writer, by modern standards this is a heavy brine and the vegetables will emerge very salty unless thoroughly drained and rinsed.
- Quart measures are by volumeThe vegetables are measured in dry quarts of prepared pieces, not by weight. A quart of cubed cucumber is roughly 1 to 1¼ lb; a quart of small silver-skinned onions is about 1½ lb. Only four quarts are actually specified — the cauliflower and the two peppers are counted by the piece — but the batch is a very large one either way.
- Silver-skinned onionsThese are small white pickling onions, an inch or less across, sold in some markets in late summer. Frozen pearl onions are the usual substitute, though they are softer.
- Green tomatoesUnripe fruit, not tomatillos and not green-when-ripe varieties. They were a standard end-of-season pickling vegetable because the crop had to be cleared before frost.
- Boiling in the brineBringing the vegetables to a boil in the same salt solution blanches them and sets their colour. Cauliflower and small whole cucumbers go slack quickly at this stage; the original assumes a cook watching the pot rather than a timer.
Mixed pickle of this kind — cucumber, onion, cauliflower and green tomato — descends from the English piccalilli tradition, itself generally traced to eighteenth-century attempts to imitate Indian achar with the vegetables an English kitchen garden actually produced. Somewhere along the way the dish became thoroughly American household work: a way to use the last of the garden before frost, made when the whole crop arrived at once.