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Chow Chow
1 quart small white onions 1 quart small cucumbers 2 heads cauliflower 3 green peppers 1 quart vinegar 6 tablespoons mustard 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon turmeric Peel onions and add cucumbers, cauliflower separated into flowerlets and sliced green peppers. Soak over night in brine (1 cup salt to 1 quart water). Drain and cook in fresh brine until vegetables are tender, and drain again. Boil vinegar in kettle and add paste made with mustard, flour, sugar, turmeric and a little cold vinegar, stirring until mixture thickens; add vegetables and cook slowly 10 minutes. Seal in sterilized jars.
The flavourings here are sound old-fashioned mustard pickle, but the canning method is one that current guidance has abandoned outright.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal in sterilized jars" means ladling hot pickle into jars and screwing on the lid with no further processing. That was standard practice for decades, but it leaves no verified heat treatment of the jar contents and no reliable vacuum, so spoilage organisms can survive in the headspace and at the seal.
- The flour is the real problemThree tablespoons of flour thicken the syrup enough to slow heat movement through the jar. No tested home-canning process exists for starch-thickened pickles, because heat penetration cannot be predicted and the cold spot in the centre of the jar may never reach a lethal temperature.
- Acidity is diluted and unquantifiedSafety in a pickle depends on the finished acidity, not on the presence of vinegar. Here a quart of vinegar of unstated strength is stretched across roughly three quarts of drained, water-logged vegetables and a cup of sugar, and the pH of the result is unknown. Older household recipes often did not specify vinegar strength, and it cannot be assumed to be the standardised 5 percent sold today.
- Cauliflower and onions are low-acidCauliflower florets and whole small onions are dense, low-acid vegetables that hold brine poorly at the centre. In a thickened, under-acidified pack with no processing, they are the pieces most likely to shelter surviving spores.
- The salt soak is not a preservative stepA cup of salt to a quart of water draws out moisture and firms the vegetables, but the salt is drained away twice and contributes nothing to the safety of the sealed jar. It should not be mistaken for a cure.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested chow chow or mustard pickle recipe with a specified vinegar strength and a boiling-water processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Chow chow is the English-speaking world's catch-all name for a mixed vegetable pickle bound in mustard, and the name is generally traced to the pidgin English chow chow, meaning a mixture or assortment of odds and ends, carried home through the China trade in the nineteenth century. The dish itself is thoroughly domestic: an end-of-season way to use up the small onions, undersized cucumbers, late cauliflower and green peppers that were too small or too plain to be worth serving on their own, held together by turmeric-yellow mustard sauce.