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Celery Pickles
Put together in a porcelain-lined kettle two quarts chopped white cabbage, two quarts chopped celery, three quarts vinegar, half ounce each of crushed white ginger root and turmeric, fourth pound white mustard seed, two table-spoons salt, five of sugar; cook slowly several hours until cabbage and celery are tender.
A cooked mustard-and-turmeric pickle of the chow-chow family, sharp with vinegar and heavily spiced. The proportions work; the cooking time does not.
- Porcelain-lined kettleThis means a non-reactive pan — enamelled cast iron or stainless steel. Vinegar and turmeric will pit bare aluminium and pick up a metallic taste from unlined copper or iron.
- Cut the cooking time"Several hours" of slow simmering will reduce chopped cabbage and celery to a khaki puree. Forty-five minutes to an hour, covered, at a bare simmer is enough for both to go tender while keeping some texture; the syrup thickens as it reduces.
- Weights to volumesHalf an ounce of crushed white ginger root is roughly 2 tablespoons; half an ounce of turmeric is about 2 tablespoons of the ground spice. A quarter pound of white mustard seed is about 2/3 cup — the dominant flavour here, so do not cut it.
- White ginger rootNineteenth-century "white ginger" was scraped and bleached dried ginger, sold in hard pieces to be crushed at home. Dried whole ginger cracked with a mallet, or an equivalent measure of ground dried ginger, gives the same effect. Fresh ginger tastes quite different and will not keep as well in the jar.
- Vinegar strengthThree quarts of vinegar to four quarts of vegetables is a generous, deliberately acidic bath. Use standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar; the low-acid "drinking" vinegars now on shelves are not suitable for pickling.
- Salt and sugarTwo tablespoons of salt across four quarts of vegetables is modest by pickle standards — taste at the end and adjust. Use plain pickling or kosher salt, since iodised salt can cloud the liquid.
- Yield and keepingSeveral quarts. The book gives no sealing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle: pack hot into clean jars, cool, and keep chilled, where it will hold for a couple of months. For shelf storage, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure rather than improvising.
- Turmeric stainsIt will colour wooden spoons, plastic bowls and grout permanently. Work in glass, stainless or enamel and wipe spills immediately.
Recipes of this type — chopped cabbage and a second vegetable simmered in spiced, mustard-heavy vinegar — filled the pickle chapters of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks under a shifting set of names: chow-chow, piccalilli, mustard pickle, and here simply celery pickle. The mustard seed, turmeric and ginger reflect a taste for Anglo-Indian pickling that reached American kitchens through British cookery and the spice trade, with turmeric doing double duty as flavour and as the yellow that made a jar look like the commercial article. Celery is the telling ingredient: once a fussy, blanched, labour-intensive crop treated as something of a luxury, by the 1880s it was more widely grown and marketed, though it still carried some status at table. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) devoted long sections to pickles and preserves because they were the household's practical means of carrying garden vegetables through the winter.