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Another Good Pickle
Two quarts small cucumbers, one quart small onions, two small cauliflowers, one quart beans; let them lie over-night, with a small teacup of salt in a gallon of water; in the morning put them on the stove and let them come to a scald, then take out and let them cool. To two quarts of vinegar put one ounce of curry powder, one ounce turmeric, one ounce ground ginger, two ounces mustard, one teaspoon cayenne pepper, two or three tablespoons salad oil; mix all together, and let it just come to a boil and pour over the vegetables.
A mixed vegetable pickle in the Anglo-Indian style, closer to piccalilli than to a dill pickle. The spicing is heavy by weight and the method assumes a cool cellar, so a few things need translating.
- The brine is weak on purposeA small teacup of salt is perhaps half a cup, in a gallon of water — very roughly a 3 percent brine, depending on how big the teacup was. It is an overnight crisping soak to draw water out of the vegetables, not a preserving cure, so do not extend it for days.
- "Come to a scald"Bring the vegetables up to just below a boil and pull them off at once; the recipe does not say whether to do this in the salt water or in fresh. The point is to set the colour and take the raw edge off, not to cook them; cauliflower and beans go limp within a minute or two of a rolling boil.
- Spice quantities are by weightAn ounce each of curry powder, turmeric and ground ginger works out at roughly 3 to 5 tablespoons apiece depending on the spice, and two ounces of mustard is roughly half a cup of dry mustard powder. This is a thick, gritty, mustard-yellow liquor rather than a clear vinegar — that is correct for the style.
- Mustard means the dry powderNineteenth-century recipes calling for "mustard" in a pickle mean ground mustard flour, not prepared table mustard. Prepared mustard would throw the acidity and the texture off entirely.
- Salad oilIn this period that means a mild olive oil. Any neutral oil works. It will float on the surface.
- Vegetable prep the recipe assumesCucumbers small enough to leave whole, pickling onions peeled, cauliflower broken into small florets, and the quart of beans strung and cut into short lengths. Two small cauliflowers might come to a couple of pounds trimmed.
- Yield and storageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing step, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle: pack into clean jars, keep the vegetables submerged, refrigerate, and use within a couple of months. It is not a shelf-stable canned product as written.
- Resting timeIt is edible after a few days but the turmeric and mustard need two to three weeks to stop tasting raw and dusty.
This is piccalilli under another name — the English adaptation of Indian mixed pickle that had been circulating in British cookbooks since the eighteenth century, when "India pickle" recipes leaned on turmeric, ginger and mustard to imitate an achar. By the 1870s curry powder was a commercial grocery item in Britain and North America, which is why it can be called for by the ounce here alongside the individual spices rather than being built from scratch. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and is generally described as Canada's first fundraising community cookbook; its contributed recipes show exactly this sort of everyday imperial borrowing, an Anglo-Indian pickle sitting a few pages from the plainest boiled puddings. The vagueness — "another good pickle," no yield, no sealing instructions — is typical of a book written by cooks for other cooks who already knew what a crock of pickle looked like.