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Virginia Mixed Pickle
One-half peck green tomatoes, twenty-five medium-sized cucumbers, fifteen large white onions, one-half peck small onions, four , fifteen large white onions, one-half peck small onions, four heads cabbages, one pint grated horse-radish, one-half pound white mustard-seed, one-fourth pound ground mustard, one-half tea-cup ground black pepper, one-half pint salad oil, one ounce celery seed, one-half ounce ground cinnamon, two ounces turmeric. Slice the tomatoes and large onions cut cabbage as for slaw, quarter cucumpieces two inches long, leaving the peel on, and add the small onions whole. Mix with salt thoroughly, let stand twenty-four hours; drain off the juice, and pour vinegar and water over pickles. Let stand a day or two, strain again as dry as possible; mix the spices well except the ground mustard, then boil one and one-half gallons fresh apple vinegar and pour boiling hot over the pickles; do this three mornings in succession, using the same vinegar each time. The third time add one pound of sugar to the vinegar and boil, pouring over as above; also mix the oil and ground mustard together with a small portion of the vinegar, and add when cold. Oil can be omitted if not relished. - Mrs. M. B.
Sperry, Nashville, Tenn.
A crock-scale mustard pickle of the chow-chow family, written for a household that put up several gallons at a time. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the text is garbled in places by the original typesetter; everything below is about scaling it down and pinning down what the vague steps mean.
- A peck is 8 dry quartsHalf a peck of green tomatoes is roughly 6-7 lb, and half a peck of small onions about the same. With twenty-five cucumbers, fifteen large onions and four cabbages on top of that, the finished batch runs to several gallons. Quartering the whole recipe gives a manageable amount.
- The salt is unmeasured"Mix with salt thoroughly" assumed a cook who knew the ratio. A dry salting of this kind generally runs about 1 cup of coarse pickling salt per gallon of cut vegetables. Use non-iodised salt; iodine and anti-caking agents cloud the brine and darken the vegetables.
- "Fresh apple vinegar" and acidityThis meant new-made cider vinegar from the farm, of unknown and often low strength. Use commercial cider vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, and do not dilute it beyond the one rinsing step the recipe calls for. Acidity is what keeps the pickle.
- Salad oilIn this period salad oil meant olive oil, or sometimes a neutral cottonseed oil. It is rubbed smooth with the ground mustard to make a paste, which keeps the mustard from clumping when it hits the cold vinegar. The recipe itself says the oil can be left out.
- The turmeric is for colourTwo ounces is a great deal by volume, something like a third to a half cup of ground turmeric. It carries no heat and little flavour at that dose; it is there to give the mustard pickle its yellow. Scale it with the rest of the batch and expect it to stain everything it touches.
- Three scalding morningsReheating the same vinegar and pouring it boiling over the drained vegetables on three successive days draws water out of them in stages, so they stay crisp rather than collapsing in one long boil. Keep the vegetables in a non-reactive crock, glass or stainless bowl, never bare aluminium or copper.
- Add the mustard coldThe oil-and-mustard paste goes in only after the last vinegar has cooled. Boiling ground mustard drives off its pungency and turns it flatly bitter; added cold, it thickens the liquor slightly and stays sharp.
- StorageThe original assumed a cool cellar and a covered stone crock. Pack the finished pickle into clean jars and keep it refrigerated, where it will hold for months and improve for the first few weeks. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested processing schedule rather than this text, which gives none.
Mixed pickle of this type - green tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and cabbage bound in a yellow mustard liquor - sits between English piccalilli and what most Southern cooks came to call chow-chow, and it exists chiefly because gardens end all at once. The half peck of *green* tomatoes may be read as a sign of the week of the first frost, when everything still on the vine has to be salted down or lost, though green tomatoes were also chosen simply for their firmness. Turmeric, celery seed, cinnamon and two grades of mustard were all shop-bought spices by the 1880s, cheap enough that a Nashville household could use them by the ounce and the half pound, which is itself a marker of how far the spice trade had reached into ordinary kitchens. *The Dixie Cook Book* was a compilation stitched together from contributed receipts, some of them credited with a name and a town, and Mrs. Sperry's entry has the characteristic looseness of a recipe written down by someone who had made it many times and never needed to state how much salt.