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Chow-Chow
Cut into small pieces two heads of white cabbage and boil them until they are quite tender; then take two heads of cauliflower, cut them up, place them in a separate pan, and boil; also one quart of small onions, a dozen small cucumbers, one-half gallon of small tomatoes and six roots of chopped celery; cooking all in separate pans. Then put two gallons of vinegar, four ounces each of ground mustard and mustard seed, a small pot of French mustard, two ounces of turmeric and one ounce of cloves into a pan and set this over the fire. When it boils mix all the vegetables together and pour the liquor over them. Let it get cold and then put it into jars; cover these over and tie down.
Chutney. Remove the peelings and cores from two or three pounds of green cooking-apples, chop them up, put them into a saucepan with three breakfast cupfuls of vinegar, and boil them to a pulp. Pour this pulp out into a basin and when cold mix in one ounce each of garlic and chillies, two ounces of shallots, all finely minced, one ounce of ground ginger, two ounces of salt, four ounces each of mustard seed and tamarinds, three-quarters of a pound of stoned and chopped raisins, and one pound of moist sugar, and stir all well together. Place the chutney in bottles, lay them near the fire for several days, cork them up and keep in a cold place until required. This is always best for preserving them.
Two hotel-scale preserves run together in one paragraph: a mustard pickle and an Anglo-Indian chutney. Both are high-acid and workable at home, but the quantities and the storage instructions belong to a commercial kitchen with a cold cellar.
- Cook each vegetable separately, and stop it separatelyThis is the hinge of the chow-chow and the reason for all those pans. Cabbage, cauliflower, onions, cucumber, tomato and celery reach doneness at wildly different points; cooked together the cauliflower disintegrates before the onions soften. Take each one just short of tender, since it will soften further sitting in boiling vinegar.
- ScaleAs written the chow-chow is roughly two gallons of vinegar over something like fifteen to twenty pounds of vegetables, a very large batch that would fill well over a dozen quart jars. Quartering it gives a manageable amount; most of the spice quantities scale down cleanly.
- Salt the vegetables firstOscar omits the step, but modern chow-chow recipes layer the cut vegetables with coarse salt overnight and drain them before cooking. Without it the water they release dilutes the vinegar, which both weakens the flavour and lowers the acidity that keeps the pickle.
- "A small pot of French mustard"A jar of prepared French mustard of the Dijon type. The quantity is genuinely unfixable; season the boiling vinegar to taste.
- "Six roots of chopped celery"Most likely six heads of celery rather than celeriac; period recipes often speak of a "root" of celery meaning the whole head.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5 per cent cider or distilled vinegar. Wine vinegars and artisan vinegars vary and some fall below the acidity a pickle relies on.
- Chutney measuresA breakfast cupful is about a cup to a cup and a quarter. "Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, so light or dark brown sugar. Tamarind is best taken from a block of seedless pulp rather than concentrate, which is far more sour by weight.
- Ignore the fireside ripeningStanding the bottled chutney near the fire for several days before corking was presumably meant to mature and mellow it. Ripen it instead in sealed jars in the refrigerator for a few weeks.
- Storage"Cover these over and tie down" describes a paper-and-string closure for a cold larder, not a seal. Keep both preserves in the refrigerator, or process the filled jars by a current tested boiling-water-bath method for shelf storage.
Chow-chow reached American tables by two routes that have never fully separated: the name is generally traced to Chinese pidgin English, where chow-chow meant a mixed relish or assortment, and it travelled with the China trade into British and then American usage for a mustard-and-turmeric vegetable pickle. By the 1890s it was thoroughly domesticated, a standing item in Pennsylvania and Southern farm kitchens for using up the end-of-season garden. That it appears here, in Oscar Tschirky's collection from the Waldorf, alongside a chutney built on green apples, tamarind and chillies, says something about the reach of the hotel's larder. Both recipes belong to the preserving chapter of the Victorian repertoire, where vinegar and sugar did the work now done by refrigeration.