Chow Chow
One peck of green tomatoes, half peck string beans, quarter peck small white onions, quarter pint green and red peppers mixed, two large heads cabbage, four table-spoons white mustard seed, two of white or black cloves, two of celery seed, two of allspice, one small box yellow mustard, pound brown sugar, one ounce of turmeric; slice the tomatoes and let stand over night in brine that will bear an egg; then squeeze out brine, chop cabbage, onions and beans, chop tomatoes separately, mix with the spices, put all in porcelain kettle cover with vinegar, and boil three hours.
A full end-of-season pickling batch, sized for a farm household with a cellar. The quantities are dry measure and the boiling time is far longer than modern practice wants.
- Scale it down firstA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12-14 lb of green tomatoes; the whole recipe yields something on the order of 10-12 quarts of finished relish. A quarter of the recipe fills a stockpot and is plenty for a year of eating.
- The other dry measuresHalf a peck of string beans is about 4 lb, a quarter peck of small onions about 3 lb. "Quarter pint" of mixed green and red peppers means half a cup, chopped.
- Brine that will bear an eggThis is the old test for a strong brine, roughly a 10 percent salt solution, on the order of a third to a half cup of pickling salt per quart of water. Mix, then float a raw egg to check. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt clouds the brine.
- One small box yellow mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared condiment. Box sizes varied; read as about 2 oz, that is roughly half a cup. The ounce of turmeric is about 3 to 4 tablespoons and does most of the colouring.
- An ambiguous line"Two of white or black cloves" probably means peppercorns rather than clove buds, which are not sold white or black; two tablespoons of whole cloves in this quantity would dominate everything. The measure is genuinely unclear, so treat it as pepper and adjust to taste.
- Porcelain kettleEnamelled cast iron or stainless steel. Bare iron, aluminium and copper react with vinegar and salt, greying the vegetables and picking up a metallic edge.
- Three hours is too longCut it to about 45 minutes to an hour, until the beans and onions are tender and the liquid has thickened slightly. Three hours of boiling in vinegar reduces green tomatoes and cabbage to a khaki paste and drives off much of the acid's bite.
- Vinegar and keepingUse vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity so the mixture stays reliably acidic. The original assumes crocks in a cool cellar; refrigerate what you will eat within a month and follow a current tested boiling-water canning process for the rest, since no jar processing is given here.
Chow chow is the catch-all Southern pickle of the late-season garden, made from whatever refused to ripen before frost, which is why green tomatoes anchor this version. The name is generally traced to the pidgin English "chow chow" used in the China trade for a mixed sweet pickle or medley, and by the later nineteenth century recipes appear in American cookbooks both North and South, in a mustard-and-turmeric Southern style and a sweeter Pennsylvania Dutch one. The turmeric and yellow mustard here mark it as kin to the English mustard pickles and piccalillis. A household that grew its own vegetables needed a way to convert bushels of unripe fruit into something that would sit on the table beside cold meat all winter.