Home › Pickles › Cauliflower Pickles (Choose such as are fine)
Cauliflower Pickles (Choose such as are fine)
Choose such as are fine and of full size, cut away al' the leaves, and pull away the flowers by bunches; soak ir brine that will float an egg for two days, drain, put in bottles with whole black pepper, allspice, and stick cinnamon; boil vinegar, and with it mix mustard smoothly, a little at a time and just thick enough to run into the jars, pour over the cold cauliflower and seal while hot. An equal quantity or less of small white cuions, prepared as directed in recipe for onion pickles, may be added before the vinegar is poured over.
This is a mustard pickle of the open-kettle type, and the method it describes falls outside anything current preserving guidance will support. The notes below explain where it breaks down rather than how to rescue it.
- No measured acidThe recipe never states how much vinegar, of what strength, in proportion to the vegetables. Cauliflower and onions are low-acid, and safe pickling depends on flooding them with vinegar of known acidity (5 percent) in a known ratio. Without that number there is no way to know whether the finished jar sits below pH 4.6, the line under which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow.
- The mustard binder is the specific problemVinegar thickened with mustard "just thick enough to run into the jars" is a viscous, starchy, protein-rich medium. It dilutes and buffers the acid, and it slows the movement of that acid into dense cauliflower stems. A thin brine equilibrates in days; a thick mustard sauce may never bring the interior of a floret into the safe range.
- "Seal while hot" is not a processOpen-kettle sealing — filling jars with hot liquid and closing them, with no boiling-water bath afterwards — was standard practice in the 1880s and is now considered unsafe for any product. The jar is not sterilised, the seal is unreliable, and nothing kills organisms introduced by the ladle, the funnel or the jar rim.
- Cold vegetables, hot liquidThe cauliflower goes in cold and drained; only the vinegar-mustard mixture is hot. Poured over cold, packed florets it drops in temperature immediately, so the pack never reaches a temperature that would matter even briefly.
- The salting stage is not preservation"Brine that will float an egg" means a strong salt solution; an egg floats at roughly 10 percent salt by weight, well short of saturation. Two days in it draws water out of the florets and firms them, which is what the author is after, but the vegetables are then drained, and nothing in that step carries preservation forward into the jar.
- Bottles, not jars"Put in bottles" may reflect period usage in which narrow-necked glass with cork or wax seals was still used for pickles, though the same recipe goes on to say "jars." Closures of that kind cannot be trusted to hold a vacuum and cannot be checked.
- If you want mustard pickleUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service, which will give you weights, vinegar strength and a processing time. Do not adapt this one.
Cauliflower under mustard is the ancestor of the jarred "mustard pickle" and of piccalilli, a family of English pickles whose name is first recorded in the mid-eighteenth century (as "paco-lilla" / India pickle) and associated with the vogue for Indian-inflected sour condiments; turmeric-yellow mustard sauces poured over cauliflower, small onions and cucumbers appear commonly in Anglo-American cookbooks by the middle of the nineteenth century. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same editorial stable that produced Buckeye Cookery, devotes a long section to pickles because a household without refrigeration relied on them for acid and interest at the table through the winter — the pickle jar did the work now done by a bottle of hot sauce or a jar of capers. The instruction to choose heads "fine and of full size" and to pull the curd apart "by bunches" rather than cutting it is traditional advice; pulled florets are said to hold their shape in brine better than knife-cut ones, which shed crumbs and cloud the liquid.