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Pickled Cauliflowers
Take two cauliflowers which have been cut up, one pint of small onions and three medium-sized red peppercorns; dissolve one-half pint of salt in water enough to cover the vegetables, and after allowing them to stand in this all night drain off the water. Boil two quarts of vinegar with four tablespoonfuls of mustard and three tablespoonfuls of turmeric, then put in the vegetables and boil for fifteen or twenty minutes, or until the cauliflower is tender. Put the cauliflower into wide-mouthed bottles or jars and pour the hot vinegar over them.
A yellow mustard-and-turmeric pickle of the piccalilli family, written for a hotel larder where jars were used up quickly. The method is sound as far as it goes, but it stops short of anything that makes the jars shelf-stable.
- Storage is the real issueBoiling vegetables in vinegar and pouring them hot into jars is open-kettle packing, which current guidance no longer accepts for shelf storage. Treat these as refrigerator pickles and eat them within a couple of months, or follow a tested modern water-bath process for pickled cauliflower.
- "Three medium-sized red peppercorns"Peppercorns do not come in medium size; the sense here is three small red chile pods, whole. Fresh red cayenne or dried whole red chiles both work.
- Half a pint of saltMeasured by volume that is one cup, perhaps 5 to 8 oz depending on the coarseness of the salt. It is a holding brine, not a seasoning: the water is thrown away, so the finished pickle is far less salty than the figure suggests. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt clouds the brine.
- Mustard and turmericBoth are dry ground spices, not prepared mustard. Four tablespoons of mustard powder and three of turmeric to two quarts of vinegar gives the deep yellow, faintly gritty liquor typical of Victorian yellow pickles; the turmeric will stain wooden spoons and countertops stubbornly.
- Vinegar strengthUse commercial vinegar at 5 percent acidity, undiluted. Cider or white distilled both suit the spicing; homemade or "reduced acid" vinegars are unreliable here because the acid is doing the preserving.
- The boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes in boiling vinegar leaves cauliflower quite soft, which was the expected texture. For florets with any bite left, three to five minutes is closer to the mark, and the onions can go in first since they take longer.
- A pint of small onionsAbout 10 to 12 oz of pearl or boiling onions, peeled. Frozen peeled pearl onions are a reasonable substitute and save a tedious half hour.
- Jars and yieldTwo heads of cauliflower and a pint of onions will fill something on the order of three quarts, depending on the size of the heads. Wash jars and lids in hot soapy water and warm them before filling so they do not crack when the boiling vinegar goes in, and make sure the vegetables stay submerged.
Oscar Tschirky, matre d'htel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a fat compendium that ranges from banquet cookery to the plain household preserving a hotel kitchen still did in bulk. Mustard-and-turmeric pickles of this type descend from English piccalilli, itself generally traced to eighteenth-century attempts to imitate Indian achar with the spices available in London; the turmeric supplied the colour, the mustard the heat, and the vinegar did the work. Cauliflower, small onions and red peppers were a common combination, and jars of the bright yellow stuff sat on American relish trays beside chow-chow and spiced peaches well into the twentieth century, meant to cut through cold meats and heavy sauces rather than to be eaten on their own.