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Pickled Cauliflower
Break off the flowers into small sprays or bunches, and boil three minutes in brine made according to the directions for pickled peppers. Drain the cauliflower, and lay it in a sieve, sprinkling layer after layer with salt. Let the cauliflower stand thus over night; in the morning brush off the salt and place the cauliflower in a stone jar, distributing here and there a slice of red pepper. Now pour cold vinegar over it, and allow it to stand two days, after which drain off the vinegar, and season. To every gallon of vinegar allow one cup of sugar, one dozen blades of mace and one tablespoon each of coriander seed and whole mustard, placing the spices in thin bags. Boil the vinegar with the spices five minutes and pour it over the cauliflower; repeat this scalding process once a week for three weeks, always leaving the spices in the vinegar to draw out their flavor. Be sure the vinegar is boiling when poured on the cauliflower. Lay a plate on the pickle to keep it under the vinegar. Pickled cauliflower should be carefully examined at least once a month, as it is very difficult to keep through the year. How-
This is an open-crock pickle intended to sit at room temperature for a year, and the safety of the whole method rests on a vinegar strength the recipe never states. The notes below explain the terms and where the procedure fails by current standards.
- No acidity is specifiedThe keeping quality of any vinegar pickle depends on the finished acetic acid concentration, and this recipe gives no strength for the vinegar, no ratio of vinegar to water, and no way to judge the result. Household vinegar in 1900 ranged widely in strength, including home-made cider vinegar of unknown and often low acidity.
- Open storage at room temperatureA stone jar with a plate laid on top is not a seal. Cauliflower is a low-acid vegetable, and a crock held at ambient temperature for months relies entirely on the surrounding vinegar staying strong enough; surface yeasts and molds consume acid as they grow and raise the pH of the brine beneath them.
- The author's own warning"Very difficult to keep through the year" and "carefully examined at least once a month" show that spoilage was a recognised risk with this method. The monthly inspection, and the weekly re-scalding that the recipe presents as both flavouring and keeping measure, are not a substitute for a tested process.
- Re-scalding does not sterilisePouring boiling vinegar over cold cauliflower in a crock heats the surface and little else. Nothing in the method brings the whole mass to a measured temperature for a measured time, so any contamination already established in the interior of the florets survives.
- The cross-reference is missingThe brine is specified only as "made according to the directions for pickled peppers," which appears elsewhere in the book. As printed here the salt concentration of the first boil is simply unknown, and the text itself breaks off mid-word at "How-".
- Archaic termsA blade of mace is one dried strip of the aril that sheathes a nutmeg; modern equivalence tables put a blade at somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace, so twelve blades to the gallon is a modest amount of spice. A stone jar is a glazed stoneware crock. The "slice of red pepper" is presumably a red pepper pod, sliced for colour and heat rather than for preservation.
- If you want pickled cauliflowerUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength, a measured vinegar-to-water ratio and a specified processing time, or treat it as a refrigerator pickle eaten within weeks.
Pickled cauliflower belongs to the English mixed-pickle tradition that American cookbooks inherited wholesale: cauliflower, small onions, gherkins and beans held in spiced vinegar, closely related to piccalilli and to the older "mangoes" of eighteenth-century receipt books. The spicing here — mace, coriander and whole mustard in thin bags — is straight out of that lineage, and the bags exist so the spices can be lifted, reused and left to keep infusing the vinegar rather than clouding it. A section on pickles and catsups was expected in a book of this kind: shop-bought pickles were available by then, but putting up a crock of something sharp to eat with cold meat through the winter was still ordinary domestic work. The candid warning that this one is hard to keep through the year is a reminder of how much preserving before reliable home canning depended on frequent watching.