Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Spanish Pickles
Spanish Pickles
Pull in pieces the flower of a small head of cauliflower and cut in pieces about one inch long eighteen large white cucumbers. If the cucumbers are fresh let them steep in brine for twenty-four hours; but if they have been kept in brine soak them for three days in pure cold water before cutting them up. Put the pieces of cucumber and cauliflower over the fire, cover with water, add a little salt and let them simmer gently for twenty minutes. Cut twelve small onions in quarters, put them in a little fresh milk and water over the fire, add a little salt and let them cook till just tender, but not soft. Steep four green peppers in weak brine for twelve or fourteen hours. Let all drain till next day, then put them into a pan with one-half ounce each of light-colored turmeric, celery seed rolled and white mustard, two ounces of the best English table-mustard and one saltspoonful of prepared corn starch, blended with a little vinegar and eight ounces of loaf sugar. Add sufficient vinegar to cover and let it boil till it begins to thicken. Let it cool a little and then put it in glass jars with glass tops.
This is a mustard pickle in the piccalilli family, scaled for a hotel larder rather than a home kitchen. The quantities produce something on the order of six to eight quarts, so halving or quartering is reasonable.
- Scale firstEighteen large cucumbers plus a cauliflower and twelve onions is a restaurant batch. Cutting the recipe to a quarter makes it far easier to handle in one pan.
- White cucumbersWhite-skinned garden varieties were grown in this period; the recipe does not say why they are specified, though a pale skin would not colour the mustard sauce. Small firm pickling cucumbers are the closest modern stand-in; avoid waxed slicing cucumbers, whose skins resist brine.
- Brine strengthOscar never gives one, and no single period standard can be cited. A strong salting brine is intended for the twenty-four-hour steep and a weaker one for the peppers. Use non-iodised salt so the liquid stays clear.
- The milk for the onionsCooking onions in milk and water is traditionally said to keep them pale rather than to add flavour. Watch them closely and pull them while they still have bite; they will soften further in the hot vinegar.
- Weights and old measuresHalf an ounce of turmeric, celery seed or white mustard seed is about two tablespoons. Two ounces of English mustard is roughly half a cup of Colman's-style powder, and it is what makes the pickle sharp. A saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon. Eight ounces of loaf sugar is a scant cup and a quarter of granulated.
- VinegarUse a commercial vinegar at 5 percent acidity, cider or distilled white. Nineteenth-century vinegar varied wildly, and acidity is the main thing preserving this pickle.
- ThickeningBlend the cornstarch and dry mustard to a smooth paste with cold vinegar before it meets the hot pan, or the mustard will clump. "Boil till it begins to thicken" means a few minutes at a simmer, not a long reduction; the sauce should coat the vegetables, not set into paste.
- StorageSealing hot pickle under a glass lid was standard in 1896 but is not a modern preserving method, and the recipe gives no processing time. Treat the jars as refrigerator pickles and eat within a couple of months, or follow a current water-bath canning procedure for mustard pickles. Discard any jar that shows mould, cloudiness or a lifted lid.
Mustard pickles of this type spread through Britain and America in the nineteenth century under a shifting set of names: piccalilli, chow-chow, Indian pickle, and here Spanish pickle. The turmeric-and-mustard formula is generally traced to the East India trade rather than to Spain, and the Spanish label is often said to have attached to the version heavy on green peppers, though the evidence is thin. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 Cook Book as a working record of a large hotel kitchen, which is why the vegetables are counted by the dozen and the cucumbers, already kept in brine, are soaked in cold water to draw out the salt. A pickle like this sat on the sideboard as a relish for cold meats, and its keeping quality mattered as much as its taste.