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Beet Relish
1 quart chopped cabbage 1 quart chopped cooked beets 1 cup grated horseradish 2 cups vinegar 1 cup sugar Salt Combine the cabbage, beets and horseradish and season with salt. Scald the vinegar, dissolve the sugar in it and add it to the first mixture. Cook until clear. Seal in clean hot jars. This is particularly good with mutton.
A sweet-sour chopped relish of the type that filled cellar shelves in the 1920s and 30s. The proportions are workable as flavour, but the preserving method given here is one that food-safety practice abandoned decades ago.
- Why the sealing method failsThe recipe uses what was called open-kettle canning: hot relish ladled into hot jars and sealed, with no processing in a boiling-water bath. Nothing sterilises the jar rim, the lid or the headspace, and the seal formed by cooling alone is unreliable. Modern tested pickle recipes all specify a measured boiling-water-bath time.
- Acidity is not high enough for a shelf-stable packTwo cups of vinegar are carrying two full quarts of chopped vegetables plus a cup of horseradish, and beets and cabbage are both low-acid. The finished pH is unknown and very likely above the 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. In a sealed, airless jar held at room temperature that is precisely the condition botulinum toxin needs.
- No vinegar strength is statedPeriod recipes seldom gave one, and household vinegar varied in acetic acid content. Current pickling recipes specify 5 percent acidity for exactly this reason, because the calculation does not work without it.
- Salt is unmeasured"Salt" with no quantity is a seasoning instruction, not a preserving one. It contributes nothing dependable to keeping quality here.
- If you want beet relishUse a current tested recipe from a reputable preserving source, which will give vinegar strength, a measured acid ratio and a processing time for your jar size and altitude.
- On the horseradish and the mutton noteA cup of grated fresh horseradish is a large amount, and its heat is volatile: it fades markedly with cooking and with storage. The suggested pairing fits the long-standing practice of serving a sharp relish with strong-flavoured meats.
Beet-and-cabbage relish with horseradish belongs to a large family of chopped winter pickles, and beetroot and horseradish have long been paired in the condiment sold today as beet horseradish or chrain. Pickle chapters in books of this kind treated such recipes as a way to use up a garden glut and to keep something sharp on hand for plain roast and boiled meats. The instruction to "seal in clean hot jars" with no boiling-water bath was common advice in the 1920s and 30s and appears in household manuals of the period; it was progressively withdrawn as extension services and other authorities documented the connection between open-kettle canning of low-acid foods and botulism, and tested processing times replaced it.