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Chow-Chow
2 quarts small green tomatoes 12 small cucumbers 3 red peppers 1 cauliflower 2 bunches celery 1 pint small onions 2 quarts string beans ¼ lb. mustard seed 2 oz. turmeric 1/2 oz. allspice ½ oz. pepper ½ oz. clove 72
What survives here is an ingredient list, not a working recipe: the method, the vinegar and the salting stage are all missing, and the printed figures have been mangled. It is readable as a historical document but not as instructions.
- The text is truncatedThe entry breaks off after the spices, and the trailing "72" is a page number that has been swept into the ingredient column. Everything the original cook needed — the brining, the vinegar, the boiling, the packing — is absent.
- No vinegar at allChow-chow is a vinegar pickle, and vinegar is the only thing making it safe. This list names none, so there is no way to know the acid concentration the original intended.
- Low-acid vegetablesString beans, cauliflower, onions and green tomatoes are all low-acid. Packed into jars without a verified acid level and a measured process, they are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum. This is not a spoilage question you can judge by smell or appearance.
- No processing givenNo jar treatment, no boiling-water bath, no time, no headspace. Current canning guidance does not accept an unspecified pack and seal for a mixed low-acid pickle.
- Mustard seedThe mustard seed quantity was checked against the printed page and reads a quarter pound, as our text now gives.
- Spice weightsTwo ounces of turmeric and an ounce and a half each of pepper and clove are heavy by modern taste even at full batch size.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested chow-chow or mixed-pickle recipe from a reliable canning authority, one that specifies vinegar strength and processing time. Read this page for what it tells you about an older pantry.
Chow-chow is the end-of-garden pickle: whatever the frost was about to take — green tomatoes that would never ripen, the last beans, a head of cauliflower, small onions — cut up, salted, and put down in spiced vinegar with mustard and turmeric, which is what gives the mixture its yellow. The name is generally traced to pidgin usage in the China trade, where chow-chow meant a mixture or medley, and it attached itself in the nineteenth century to both the English-style mustard pickle and to the sharper, sweeter versions that took hold in Pennsylvania and the American South. A jar of chow-chow was the standing answer to a plate of cold meat or a plain boiled dinner all winter.