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Chow Chow Pickles
Let two hundred small cucumbers stand in salt and water closely covered for three days. Boil for fifteen minutes in half a gallon best cider vinegar, one ounce white mustard seed, one of black mustard seed, one of juniper berries, one of celery seed (tying each ounce separately in swiss bags), one handful small green peppers, two pounds sugar, a few small onions, and a piece alum half the size of a nutmeg; pour the vinegar while hot over the cucumbers, let stand a day, repeating the operation three or four mornings. Mix one-fourth pound mustard with the vinegar, pour over cucumbers, and seal up in bottles. - Mrs. Ada Estelle Bever.
A contributor's pickle from the era before anyone measured acidity or processed a jar. The spicing is worth reading; the preserving method is not usable, and the notes below explain the specific gaps rather than patching them.
- The brine is unmeasured"Salt and water" for three days, "closely covered," at room temperature is a fermentation step with no salt ratio and no temperature given. Brine strength is the only thing controlling what grows during those three days, and there is no way to reconstruct what the original writer used.
- The acidity cannot be knownHalf a gallon of vinegar is boiled with two pounds of sugar and poured off and reheated four or five times over cucumbers that are shedding water each time. Every cycle dilutes the vinegar by an unknown amount, so the finished pickle has no determinable pH. Nineteenth-century cider vinegar was also of variable strength, unlike the standardised 5% product sold now.
- Sealing is not processing"seal up in bottles" means packing into containers with no boiling-water bath, no headspace, no jar sterilisation and no seal test. Nothing here makes the contents shelf-stable, and the recipe does not say whether the final mustard-and-vinegar mixture is poured hot or cold. Use a current tested pickle recipe if you want to put up cucumbers for storage.
- Alum"a piece alum half the size of a nutmeg" is potassium alum, the standard crisping agent of the period. It is no longer used in home pickling; calcium chloride does the same job without the astringency, and good technique makes it unnecessary.
- Swiss bagsSwiss was a fine, sheer cotton muslin. The recipe has each ounce of spice tied separately, without saying why; cheesecloth or a spice ball is the modern equivalent.
- "One-fourth pound mustard"In recipes of this period this most likely means dry ground mustard rather than prepared table mustard, and four ounces is a great deal. Juniper berries in the spice list are unusual for the style and read as a Northern European touch.
- ScaleTwo hundred small cucumbers is roughly two gallons of gherkins, or 12-15 lb, against only half a gallon of vinegar. Modern recipes use far more liquid relative to solids, which is part of why this one relies on repeated hot pourings to get the spice in at all.
"Chow chow" is generally traced to the Anglo-Indian and China-trade vocabulary of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it is said to have meant a mixture or medley of odds and ends, though the origin of the word is not settled; in American usage it came to cover any sharply spiced mixed vegetable pickle. What the name covers varies by region: in Pennsylvania and the Maritimes it means a chunky vegetable relish, in the South often green tomato, while this version keeps to whole small cucumbers in the older gherkin manner. The Dixie Cook-Book was assembled from signed contributions by named housewives, and the instructions read as one long remembered paragraph rather than a tested formula. The repeated draining and reboiling of the same spiced vinegar over several mornings was standard practice before reliable canning.