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Spanish Pickles
One dozen cucumbers, four heads of cabbage, one peck green tomatoes, one dozen onions, three ounces white mustard-seed, one ounce celery seed, one ounce turmeric, one box Coleman's mustard, two and a half pounds brown sugar. Let the cucumbers stand in brine that will float an egg three days; slice the onions, and chop cabbage and tomatoes, the day before making, and sprinkle with salt in the proportion of half pint to a peck. When ready to make, , squeeze brine out of cucumbers, wipe them off, peel and cut them in slices, let all simmer slowly in a kettle together for half an hour, and then bottle.-
This is a mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickle of the chow-chow family, and the ingredient list has a hole in it that cannot be patched: no vinegar. As printed it is a batch of low-acid vegetables cooked briefly and sealed, which is exactly the conditions under which Clostridium botulinum thrives.
- The missing acidComparable mixed pickles of the period generally call for vinegar, often a gallon or more of cider vinegar, and the salt brine here is drained and squeezed out before cooking. Nothing in the finished mixture brings it to the pH below 4.6 that makes a pickle a pickle rather than a jar of stewed vegetables.
- Why this combination is the worst caseCabbage, onions and cucumbers are all low-acid, and tomatoes of any stage sit close to the borderline for safe canning without added acid. Sealed warm in a closed container with no measured acid and no processing, the mixture is anaerobic, moist and near-neutral — the specific conditions in which botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin.
- Sugar and mustard are not preservatives hereTwo and a half pounds of brown sugar spread across the several gallons of chopped vegetables this recipe yields is a seasoning, not a preserving concentration. Mustard flour and turmeric contribute flavour and colour and have no reliable antimicrobial effect at these levels.
- Half an hour's simmer is not a processSimmering in an open kettle heats the vegetables but does not sterilise the jars or drive out air, and "then bottle" describes open-kettle canning — a method long since abandoned in home preserving because the seal is unreliable and the contents are never held at a verified temperature.
- The brine test is unquantified"Brine that will float an egg" is a period shorthand for roughly a 10 percent salt solution, but it varies with the egg and the water, and here it is discarded anyway. It gives no preserving power to the finished jars.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe for green tomato chow-chow or mustard pickle, which will specify vinegar strength, jar size and processing time. Do not scale or adapt the text above.
- For reference on the unitsA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 pounds of green tomatoes; "one box Coleman's mustard" means a tin of dry English mustard powder, on the order of two to four ounces depending on the size then sold.
The Dixie Cook Book is associated, like the better-known Buckeye Cookery, with Estelle Woods Wilcox, and its pickle chapter reflects the late-nineteenth-century Southern kitchen at the end of the growing season, when green tomatoes stripped from frost-threatened vines had to be used up alongside the last cucumbers and the new cabbage. "Spanish pickle" was one of several loose names — along with chow-chow, piccalilli and mustard pickle — applied to chopped mixed vegetables bound with dry mustard and coloured yellow with turmeric; the Spanish label is decorative rather than geographical, much as "Spanish" was attached to onions, paprika and rice dishes in American books of the period. The Coleman's (properly Colman's) mustard called for is the Norwich-milled English mustard flour that is often said to have become a fixture in American pantries by around the 1880s, and its appearance by brand name is a small marker of how thoroughly imported branded goods had reached Southern household cookery.