Home › Pickles and Relishes › Beet Relish
Beet Relish
1 quart chopped cabbage
2 cups vinegar
1 quart chopped cooked beets
1 cup sugar
1 cup grated horseradish
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.
The flavour combination here is sound old-fashioned pickling, but the preserving method is not. The instructions describe open-kettle canning, and the acid balance is too weak for a sealed shelf-stable jar.
- Why the sealing fails"Seal in clean hot jars" is open-kettle canning: hot food is ladled into hot jars and the lid is trusted to sterilise the contents. Nothing is processed after the jar closes, so any organism introduced from the jar rim, the lid or the air survives in an oxygen-free environment. This practice was abandoned by extension services decades ago for all vegetables.
- The acid is diluted too farTwo cups of vinegar, cut with a cup of sugar, are spread across two quarts of chopped cabbage and cooked beets plus the water those vegetables release. Beets and cabbage are low-acid, and there is no way to know from this recipe whether the finished pH falls below 4.6. Sealed low-acid vegetables at ambient temperature are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and the toxin cannot be seen, smelled or tasted, so a jar may give no reliable warning.
- No vinegar strength is givenPeriod vinegar varied widely in acetic acid content, and the recipe does not specify a strength. Tested modern relish recipes call for 5 percent acidity and fix the vegetable-to-vinegar ratio precisely, because the margin between a safe pickle and an unsafe one is not visible in the jar.
- Use a current recipe insteadIf you want a beet and horseradish relish for the pantry, work from a currently tested pickling recipe with a stated processing time in a boiling-water bath. The flavour profile below is worth borrowing; the preserving instructions are not.
- What "cook until clear" meantThe cue is visual: the cabbage loses its opacity and the syrup goes glossy as the sugar dissolves and the vegetables give up water. The recipe gives no cooking time. It is a doneness sign for texture and appearance only, and tells you nothing about safe acidity.
- Grated horseradishA cup of freshly grated root is a substantial amount, and its heat is volatile: the pungent oils break down with heat and time, so a cooked relish tastes far milder than the raw mixture smelled. Prepared horseradish sold in vinegar is not a straight substitute, since it already carries its own acid and salt.
- Yield and the mutton noteThe quantities are large -- some twelve cups of vegetables, vinegar and sugar before cooking down -- and the recipe states no yield. Mutton, the meat of a mature sheep, was common on Anglo-American tables into the early twentieth century and carried a strong fat that sweet-sour, horseradish-heavy condiments were meant to cut.
Butterick's Book of Recipes and Household Helps came out of a pattern company that had built a large audience of home sewers and then sold them domestic advice, and its pickle chapter reflects what an American household of the period expected to have on the cellar shelf: chopped cabbage relishes, chow-chows and beet combinations made in quantity from garden surplus. Beet and horseradish together is an older and wider tradition than this book — the pairing appears across Central and Eastern Europe as ćwikła or chrain, eaten with cold meats and at Passover — and cabbage turns up in American versions, where it would have stretched both the yield and the vinegar. The recommendation to serve it with mutton dates the page as clearly as anything in it; mutton had largely disappeared from American butcher counters by mid-century, and the sharp sweet-sour condiments that accompanied it lost much of their reason for being at the same time.