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Piccalilli
Bruise four ounces of mustard-seed, put it into a saucepan with three pints of vinegar and boil it, remove from the fire and let it get cold. Cut four ounces of ginger into slices, separate four ounces of garlic into cloves, put them into a jar with one-half ounce each of turmeric and whole pepper and a little saffron. Strain the vinegar, boil it up again and pour it while boiling over the contents of the jar, then cover the jar close and leave it till the vinegar is cold. Prepare whatever vegetables may have been selected for the pickle, wash them well, rub them over with salt and dry them in the sun for a day or two. When ready put the vegetables in the vinegar, cover and tie the jar over with parchment and put it in a dry store-cupboard. In about six weeks the pickles will be ready for use.
This is a spiced vinegar pickle of the old English-Indian type, but as written it gives no weight of vegetables, no seal, and no refrigeration — the reasons it cannot be followed today are set out below alongside notes on the archaic terms.
- The fatal omission: no quantity of vegetablesThe recipe fixes the vinegar and spices precisely but leaves the vegetables entirely open — "whatever vegetables may have been selected." Safety in a pickle depends on the finished brine staying at or below pH 4.6, and a jar packed with low-acid vegetables (cauliflower, onion, beans, cucumber) will dilute and buffer three pints of vinegar by an unknown amount. Without a measured ratio there is no way to know whether the result is a pickle or an anaerobic jar of low-acid vegetables at room temperature, which is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum.
- Garlic in an unacidified jarGarlic in an unverified acid -- Four ounces of raw garlic cloves is a substantial quantity. Garlic is the vegetable most often named in botulism cases when it is held in oil or water without verified acidity; here it is at least scalded with boiling vinegar, but nothing in the method confirms the acid penetrates the cloves' interior, and the final acidity of the jar is unknown.
- Sun-drying on the counter, not in a controlled dryerRubbing salt over the vegetables and leaving them in the sun "for a day or two" holds cut vegetable surfaces for many hours in the range where spoilage organisms multiply, with no measured temperature, humidity or airflow. Nineteenth-century cooks accepted this; no current preserving guide does.
- Parchment tied over is not a sealA parchment cover keeps dust out. It does not exclude air or produce the vacuum of a properly processed jar, and the recipe includes no sterilisation of the jar and no heat processing after filling. Use a current, tested piccalilli or mixed-pickle recipe with stated weights and a water-bath process instead.
- Six weeks in a dry store-cupboardThe ripening period is ambient, unrefrigerated and untested. Combined with the unknown acidity, the long hold is where any error compounds rather than corrects.
- Units, for reading the recipeThree pints is six cups in American measure (Oscar's book is American); an Imperial pint would put it a little over seven. Four ounces of mustard seed is roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup, and four ounces of ginger means whole root, sliced -- not ground.
- The spicesTurmeric supplies the yellow that defines piccalilli, and the "little saffron" is a period flourish that adds almost nothing here beyond expense. "Whole pepper" is black peppercorns.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens in the eighteenth century as an imitation of Indian pickles, and early cookery books spell it "paco-lilla" or "India pickle" — the origin of the name itself is recorded as obscure, with a fanciful formation on "pickle" among the suggestions. The mustard, turmeric and ginger here are the fingerprint of that ancestry: a bright yellow, mustard-hot pickle of mixed vegetables, quite distinct from the sweet relishes that later borrowed the name in America. That it appears in the Waldorf's book at all is a reminder of how much of a grand hotel's larder was made in-house, and the six-week cupboard cure was simply part of the season's work.