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Mixed Pickles
Mix in equal quantities some small cucumbers, sliced green tomatoes, cauliflower picked into small flowerets and small button-onions. Put them in a large vessel, cover with strongly-salted water and let them steep for twenty-four hours. Then drain the brine from the pickles, scald it and dissolve in it a piece of alum the size of a nutmeg. Pour the boiling brine over the pickles. When cold strain the brine off and prepare as many quarts of vinegar as there are quarts of brine. To each quart of vinegar allow one breakfast cupful of brown sugar, one teacupful of flour and four ounces of ground mustard. Boil the sugar and vinegar. Mix the flour and mustard smooth with a very little water, then stir the boiling vinegar gradually into it. When quite smooth pour it over the pickles. When cold tie stout paper over the jar.
This is a nineteenth-century mustard pickle in the chow-chow family, and while the flavour ideas are sound the preservation method is not. The specific problems are worth spelling out.
- The flour is the fatal detailThe finishing liquid is vinegar thickened with a teacupful of flour per quart. Modern canning guidance rules out flour and other thickeners in home-canned goods: starch slows heat penetration and can shield spoilage organisms, so the contents cannot be relied on to reach a uniform safe temperature. Where current mustard-pickle recipes do use a thickened sauce, it is added and processed to a tested method.
- No processing, and a paper lid"When cold tie stout paper over the jar" is not a seal. Nothing here is filled hot, no jars are sterilised, and nothing is water-bath processed. A low-acid vegetable mix in a starch-thickened liquid under a permeable cover, held at room temperature, is a mould and spoilage problem at best.
- Alum "the size of a nutmeg"Potassium alum was the standard crisping agent of the period and this is an unweighed lump of it, roughly half an ounce by guess, dissolved into an unknown volume of brine. Modern practice dropped alum from pickling because it contributes nothing to safety and the dose here is entirely uncontrolled.
- The brine is reusedThe 24-hour steeping brine is drained, scalded, poured back, drained again and its volume used to measure the vinegar. That also means the acid strength of the finished liquid is unknowable.
- The vinegar is an unknown tooNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely in strength and was often sold without any stated acidity. Safe pickling depends on vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity, diluted no further than the recipe allows, and this one has no way to guarantee either.
- The archaic measures, for reading purposesA breakfast cupful is roughly a generous cup, a teacupful roughly three quarters of a cup, and four ounces of ground mustard is by weight. Useful for understanding the balance Oscar intended, not for reconstructing the method.
- If you want mustard picklesUse a current tested recipe with weighed vegetables, measured 5 percent vinegar, proper jars and a specified processing time. The flavour profile here, brown sugar against a heavy load of ground mustard, is easy to reproduce within one.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a fat volume that mixed hotel cookery with the plain American domestic recipes a large kitchen still needed by the barrel. Mixed pickles of this sort, cucumbers, green tomatoes, cauliflower and button onions brined, then finished in a mustard-thickened vinegar, belong to the chow-chow and piccalilli family, whose descent is generally traced to English colonial cooking, itself often said to borrow from Indian pickle traditions; the mustard-yellow sauce is the signature. Alum appears in a great many pickle recipes of the era because cooks wanted crispness before anyone understood why vegetables go limp. The instruction to tie paper over the jar suggests these pickles were not meant to be stored sealed and unattended.