Piccalilli
One large white cabbage, fifty small cucumbers, five quarts small string-beans, eight small carrots, one dozen sticks celery, five red peppers, three green peppers, two heads cauliflower; chop fine, soak over night in salt and water, wash well, drain thoroughly, and pour over them hot vinegar spiced with mace, cinnamon and allspice; turn off vinegar and scald until safe to leave like common pickles; or seal in can while hot. - Mrs. W. L.
This is a large-batch home canning recipe from the era before anyone measured acidity or processing time, and the sealing method it describes is one that food-safety authorities abandoned long ago. The notes below explain what the instructions leave out.
- The sealing method is the problem"Seal in can while hot" is open-kettle canning: hot food into a jar, lid on, no processing in a boiling-water bath. The vacuum it forms is unreliable and nothing sterilises the headspace or the underside of the lid. Modern practice requires a timed boiling-water process for every acidified pickle.
- No vinegar strength is givenSafety in a pickle depends on the finished product sitting at or below pH 4.6, which in practice means using vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid and enough of it. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in strength, and this recipe gives neither a strength nor a volume against a very large but unstated quantity of chopped vegetables.
- These are low-acid vegetablesString beans, carrots, cauliflower and cabbage are all low-acid. The recipe's sequence -- salting overnight, washing, draining, pouring vinegar over, then turning the vinegar off again to scald -- leaves it unclear how much acid actually ends up in the jar, and the vegetables' own water will dilute whatever there is. Under-acidified low-acid vegetables in a sealed anaerobic jar are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum.
- "Scald until safe to leave" is not a processThere is no temperature, no duration and no jar size here. "Safe to leave like common pickles" carries no information a modern kitchen can act on.
- The overnight salting is unquantified too"Salt and water" with no ratio means the brine could be anything from lightly seasoned to fully preserving. Salt concentration matters for both texture and the microbial load going into the jar.
- ScaleFifty cucumbers, five quarts of beans, two heads of cauliflower and a large cabbage is a farmhouse batch, running to many quarts finished. It was written for a household putting up a winter's supply at one sitting, not for a few jars.
- If you want to make piccalilliUse a current tested recipe from a reputable canning source, which will specify vinegar strength, jar size and boiling-water processing time.
Piccalilli reached American kitchens through England, where the name is generally traced to the mid-eighteenth century and is usually explained as a fanciful coinage on "pickle" — earlier English recipes for "paco-lilla" or "India pickle" appear to have been attempts at the mixed vegetable achar encountered through the East India trade, heavy with turmeric, mustard and ginger. American versions drifted away from that yellow mustard base toward the sweet-and-sour chopped relishes still sold as piccalilli in New England and the South, and this one has gone further still: no mustard or turmeric at all, just mace, cinnamon and allspice in vinegar. A chopped mixed pickle of this kind is unremarkable in a household collection — a household that grew its own vegetables faced a late-summer glut, and chopped mixed pickle was one standard way to turn the odds and ends of the kitchen garden into something that would keep on the shelf. The attribution to "Mrs. W. L." is consistent with the compiled, subscription-cookbook tradition in which recipes were contributed under a name or initials rather than written by a single author.