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Cauliflower Pickles (To twelve heads of cauliflower)
To twelve heads of cauliflower, five quarts of vinegar, five cups brown sugar, six eggs, one bottle French mustard, two tablespoonsugar , six eggs, one bottle French mustard, two tablespoonfuls ginger, a few garlic, two green peppers, one-half teaspoonful cayenne, butter size of an egg, one ounce pulverized turmeric. Beat well together the eggs, sugar, mustard, ginger, and turmeric, then boil in vinegar, with garlic and peppers, ten minutes. Boil cauliflower in salt water until tender, then place carefully in jar, pour over the boiling hot mixture. -Mrs. W. W. Eastman, Minneapolis.
A sweet mustard pickle of the chow-chow family, built on an egg-thickened turmeric dressing. The quantities are for a farm household putting up a season's worth; almost everything here needs scaling and one step needs rethinking.
- Scale it down firstTwelve heads of cauliflower and five quarts of vinegar will fill a dozen or more quart jars. A twelfth of the recipe — one head, about 1 2/3 cups vinegar, a scant 1/2 cup brown sugar, half an egg (round up to one), a rounded tablespoon of prepared mustard, 1/2 teaspoon ginger, 1 teaspoon turmeric — makes a workable quart or so.
- The hinge: the eggs will curdleBeaten eggs whisked into five quarts of vinegar and then boiled ten minutes is a scrambled sauce waiting to happen. Whisk the eggs with the sugar, mustard, ginger and turmeric into a smooth paste, boil the vinegar with the garlic and peppers for the ten minutes, then temper the hot vinegar into the egg paste a ladleful at a time and return it to the pan just long enough to thicken. Do not let it return to a hard boil.
- Don't boil the cauliflower tenderCauliflower cooked to tenderness and then flooded with boiling liquid collapses into wet fibre. Break it into florets and blanch them 3 to 4 minutes in well-salted water — still firm at the stem — then drain thoroughly before jarring.
- French mustard, one bottleIn American books of this period this generally means a bottled prepared mustard rather than mustard powder. No bottle size is given, so judge the quantity by taste; mustard powder cannot be substituted spoon for spoon.
- Butter size of an eggTwo ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It softens the vinegar's edge and gives the dressing gloss.
- One ounce pulverized turmericAbout 4 tablespoons of ground turmeric — a great deal by modern habit, but this is what gives mustard pickle its yellow. Ginger and cayenne are likewise ground, not fresh.
- A few garlicA few peeled cloves, boiled in the vinegar with the peppers. The recipe does not say to strain them out, though you can fish them out if you prefer. 'Two green peppers' most likely means sweet peppers, seeded and chopped.
- StorageTreat this as a refrigerator pickle: jar it hot, cool it, and keep it cold, eating it within a month or two. The egg-and-butter dressing over low-acid cauliflower is not a mixture to seal and store on a shelf; if you want a canned pickle, work from a current tested process rather than this text.
Sweet mustard pickles like this one — cauliflower, sugar, turmeric and prepared mustard in vinegar — belong to the broad nineteenth-century family of chow-chows and piccalillis that American cooks adapted from British and Anglo-Indian pickling, and turmeric is the reason nearly all of them are the same shade of yellow. The Minneapolis attribution on a book called The Dixie Cook Book is not the oddity it looks; the volume is generally traced to the same Midwestern compiling operation behind Buckeye Cookery, which recycled contributed receipts from its northern subscribers into regionally branded editions. What the recipe tells you plainly is the scale of a household's autumn work — twelve heads at a sitting, five quarts of vinegar, and enough jars to see a family through to spring.