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Variety Pickles
One peck each of green tomatoes and cucumbers, and one quart onions; pare, slice and salt (using a rounded half pint for all) each in separate jars, letting them stand in the salt twenty-four hours, and drain well, wringing and pressing in a cloth; sprinkle fresh green radish-pods and nasturtium seeds with salt, and let stand for the same length of time boil in water salted to taste two quarts of half-grown, very tender bean pods, until they can be pierced with a silver fork, take out and drain. Now place each in a separate jar, cover with cold, weak vinegar for twenty-four hours, drain well, pressing hard to get out all the juice, cook tomatoes as in Chopped Pickles," and then mix all well together. In a stone jar place first a layer of the mixture, sprinkle with mustard seed (prepared as directed in recipe for Chopped Pickles)," horse-radish chopped fine, cinnamon bark, rings of garden peppers, and a few cloves, then another layer of the mixture, then the spice with a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper . The spices used for this amount are nine table-spoons stick cinnamon, four and a half tea-spoons each of mustard-seed, cloves, and horse-radish, and twenty-seven rings of garden peppers.
Cover with good cider vinegar, let stand over night, drain off vinegar, and boil in a porcelain kettle, adding brown sugar in the proportion of one pint to a gallon of vinegar; skim well, pour hot over the pickles, continue to drain off and boil for several days. If not sweet enough, add more sugar, although these are not intended for sweet pickles. The proportion of cucumbers may be double or even three times the quantity of tomatoes if desired. - Mrs. W.
W. Woods.
A crock-scale mixed pickle from the era when a family put up produce by the bushel. Everything here works in a modern kitchen except the quantities and the storage assumptions.
- Start by dividing the recipeA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 12–13 lb of green tomatoes and about the same of cucumbers. With the onions and beans this yields several gallons of finished pickle. A tenth of the recipe — about 1¼ lb each of tomatoes and cucumbers — is a sane trial batch, and the spice list divides evenly by nine.
- The salt"A rounded half pint for all" means about one cup of salt distributed among the separate jars of vegetables, not a cup in each. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized salt clouds the brine and anti-caking agents make it murky.
- VesselsA "porcelain kettle" is an enamelled cast-iron or steel pan. Vinegar reacts with aluminium, copper and bare iron and can pick up a metallic taste; the silver fork called for on the beans probably reflects the same avoidance of reactive metal, though the recipe does not say so. The "stone jar" is a glazed stoneware crock; a glass or food-grade plastic container does the same job.
- Cross-referencesThe recipe twice sends you to "Chopped Pickles" elsewhere in the book, once for cooking the green tomatoes and once for preparing the mustard seed. That recipe is not reproduced here, so you will need to look it up; without it, cook the tomatoes down before mixing and treat the mustard seed as the companion recipe directs.
- Radish pods and nasturtium seedsThe seed pods left after radishes bolt, and the green seed heads of nasturtium, both pickled for their sharp, peppery bite. Nasturtium seeds were widely recommended in nineteenth-century cookbooks as a homegrown stand-in for capers. If you have neither, capers or brined green peppercorns give a similar note.
- "Garden peppers"Small hot peppers grown in the kitchen garden, sliced crosswise into rings. The variety is unstated, so the heat is unpredictable; twenty-seven rings spread through this volume is likely to read as background warmth rather than a hot pickle, with the cayenne between layers contributing as well.
- The sugarOne pint brown sugar per gallon of vinegar, roughly 2 cups to 16 cups, which is why the author insists these are not sweet pickles. It rounds off the vinegar rather than sweetening the vegetables.
- The repeated boilingDraining, reboiling and re-pouring the vinegar over several days concentrates the syrup and drives out vegetable water. It is the hinge of the method: skip it and the vegetables' own water dilutes the vinegar into a weak brine.
- StorageThis is an open-crock pickle with no sealing, no processing and no measured acidity, and the vegetables keep releasing water into the vinegar. Make it in a small quantity, keep it refrigerated and eat it within a few weeks. For anything intended to sit on a shelf, use a current tested canning recipe with a stated vinegar strength and processing time.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of late-nineteenth-century compiled household books, assembled largely from contributed recipes and credited by name — hence Mrs. W. W. Woods at the foot of this one. A "variety pickle" is close kin to what many American cooks would recognize as a mixed pickle: whatever the garden produced at the end of the season, salted down separately so each vegetable kept its own texture, then married in one crock under spiced vinegar. The green tomatoes are the giveaway that this is a frost recipe, made from fruit that would never ripen. Radish pods and nasturtium seeds appear here because both are what a garden yields after the useful part has gone by, and nasturtium seed was widely recommended in period cookbooks as a homegrown stand-in for imported capers. The scale — a peck of this, a peck of that, spices counted out in tablespoons and pepper rings counted one by one — is that of a household putting up preserves in quantity.