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California Chow-Chow
18 green tomatoes
½ cup salt
8 cucumbers
2 quarts vinegar
5 dozen small green onions
1 cup brown sugar
1 pound green string-beans
2 tablespoons turmeric powder
I cauliflower
4 tablespoons mustard seed
1 bunch celery
1 tablespoon cloves
3 chopped red peppers
1 tablespoon pepper
Dice the tomatoes, celery, and cucumbers, skin the onions and remove the tops, cut the beans in small pieces and separate the cauliflower into flowerets. Put all the vegetables, including the chopped red peppers, into an earthenware crock or bowl and sprinkle with the salt. Let stand twenty-four hours, then drain off the liquid. Heat the vinegar with the sugar and spices to the boiling-point, add the vegetables and cook until they are tender. Pack the pickles in clean, hot jars and seal.
Catsup Recipes
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A full mustard-pickle in the piccalilli family, scaled for a household that put up its winter relish by the crock. The two things that need attention are the sealing method, which is obsolete, and the cooking time, which will turn the cauliflower to mush if taken literally.
- Sealing is the weak point"Pack the pickles in clean, hot jars and seal" is open-kettle canning, standard in period cookbooks and abandoned since. For shelf storage, fill hot jars leaving half an inch of headspace and process in a boiling-water bath according to a current tested procedure for pickled vegetables; otherwise treat the whole batch as a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a couple of months.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod vinegar varied widely. Use commercial cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; the acid, not the boiling, is what preserves the relish.
- "Cook until they are tender"Aim for barely tender, roughly 10 minutes at a gentle boil. The vegetables continue to soften in the hot jars, and cauliflower and cucumber taken to full tenderness in the pot come out slack.
- The salting stageThe twenty-four hours in salt draws water out so the finished pickle is not thin. Drain well and, if you are salt-sensitive, rinse briefly and drain again; a half cup of salt on that volume of vegetables is on the assertive side.
- Ambiguous spice measures"1 tablespoon cloves" and "1 tablespoon pepper" are not specified as whole or ground. Whole cloves in a spice bag are easier to fish out and give a cleaner flavor; whole cloves loose in the jars will keep strengthening. Take the pepper as ground black pepper.
- TurmericTwo tablespoons is for color as much as flavor. It stains wooden spoons, plastic bowls and hands, so work in glass, stainless or the earthenware crock the recipe calls for.
- Green tomatoes and green onionsGreen tomatoes are unripe field tomatoes, firm and tart, sold in late summer at farm stands. The "five dozen small green onions" are what a supermarket sells as scallions or spring onions; at six to eight to a bunch, sixty onions means eight to ten bunches.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. Expect somewhere between 12 and 16 pints depending on how large the tomatoes and cauliflower run, so have far more jars ready than you think you need.
Chow-chow is the American branch of the Anglo-Indian mustard pickle, and the name is generally traced to Chinese pidgin English, where chow-chow meant a mixture or a bit of everything, carried into the English-speaking world along nineteenth-century trade routes. What arrives in a book like this one is a turmeric-yellow, mustard-seeded relish of whatever the late-summer garden gave up at once, closely related to English piccalilli and to the Pennsylvania Dutch chow-chow of the same period. The "California" in the title is doing what regional labels usually did in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks: it distinguishes one household's version from the dozen other chow-chows in circulation rather than pointing to a documented origin. The scale is worth noting. Eighteen tomatoes, five dozen onions and two quarts of vinegar was a single afternoon's work in a kitchen that expected to eat pickles with plain boiled and roasted meat all winter, and the placement of the recipe just ahead of the catsups reflects how central that vinegar-and-spice shelf was to the period table.