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Celery Relish
1½ cups chopped celery 4 teaspoons powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon mustard 1/4 cup vinegar Mix ingredients in order given. Cover and let stand in a cold place one and one-half hours. Drain off the liquid before serving. When preparing celery include some of the small tender leaves. 1 onion
A quick uncooked relish rather than a preserve, despite its place in the canning chapter. The ingredient list as printed is garbled, so read it before you start.
- The duplicated mustardMustard appears twice, at 1/2 teaspoon and 1 1/2 teaspoons, and the text gives no way to tell which is dry mustard and which might be mustard seed or prepared mustard. Treat it as an error in the setting: 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of dry mustard suits this quantity of celery, and more than that will overwhelm it.
- The orphaned onion"1 onion" is stranded at the end of the list with no instruction. Most likely it should be chopped fine and mixed in with everything else; use a small onion, or half a medium one, or the relish becomes onion salad.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period powdered sugar generally means a fine-grained granulated sugar rather than the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar is the closer match, and it dissolves readily in the vinegar.
- A cold placeAn icebox, cool cellar or pantry then; the refrigerator now. An hour and a half is a salting and draining step, not a cure: the salt and sugar draw water out of the celery so the finished relish is crisp and concentrated rather than watery.
- Do not skip the drainThe liquid that collects is salty and vinegary. Pour it off and, if the relish tastes sharp, give the celery a quick toss and drain again before serving.
- Not a canned preserveNothing here is heat-processed or acidified to a measured level, so it will not keep on a shelf. Make it the day you want it and keep leftovers refrigerated for two or three days at most.
- YieldAbout a cup after draining, enough as a condiment for four to six alongside cold meat, poultry, or a chop.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in nineteenth-century American households, sold in tall bunches, displayed upright in purpose-made celery glasses on the table, and grown commercially on the muck soils of Michigan and upstate New York, with Kalamazoo the name most often attached to the trade. That status explains why a book of this period spends recipes on it at all, and why this one insists on saving the small tender leaves rather than discarding them. The relish itself belongs to a family of quick uncooked "relishes" that sat between a salad and a pickle: salted, sugared, sharpened with vinegar, drained, and served the same day. Its appearance in the canning and preserving chapter may say more about the loose organizing habits of cookbooks of the era than about how the dish was meant to be kept.