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Chow-Chow
Mrs. John Corthell.
Two heads cabbage, two heads cauliflower, one dozen cucumbers, six roots of celery, six peppers, one quart of small white onions, two quarts green tomatoes; cut into small pieces, and boil each vegetable separately until tender, then strain them. Two gallons of vinegar, onefourth pound of mustard, one-fourth pound of mustard seed, one pot of French mustard, one ounce of cloves, two ounces of turmeric; put the vinegar and spices into a kettle and let them come to a boil; mix the vegetables and pour over the dressing.
A late-season mustard pickle scaled for a nineteenth-century pantry: as written it yields somewhere between two and three gallons. Read the whole thing before shopping, since the vinegar quantity and the spice weights are the parts that need translating.
- Yield and scalingThe vegetables alone come to roughly 15-20 lb, and with two gallons of vinegar the finished volume is three gallons or more. Quartering the recipe gives a manageable batch.
- The missing salting stepMany period chow-chow and mustard pickle recipes brine the chopped vegetables in salt overnight and drain them before pickling; this one does not. Without that step the vegetables release water into the vinegar, diluting it.
- Boiling each vegetable separatelyBoiled "until tender," cauliflower and cucumber collapse. Modern practice is a short blanch, two to three minutes, cooking each vegetable only until it loses its raw crunch so the relish keeps some bite after it sits in vinegar.
- Mustard, three waysA quarter pound of "mustard" is dry ground mustard, about a cup. A quarter pound of mustard seed is roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup of whole yellow seed. "One pot of French mustard" means a small jar of prepared mustard, probably of the smooth Dijon type; the size is not specified.
- Turmeric and clovesTwo ounces of ground turmeric is about half a cup, which is what gives commercial-style chow-chow its yellow. One ounce of cloves is very assertive; whole cloves tied in cheesecloth and lifted out after boiling give the flavour without the bitterness of ground clove left in the jar.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period varied in acidity. Use standard 5 percent cider or distilled white vinegar, and do not dilute it, since the vinegar is the only thing preserving this.
- Vegetable notes"Six roots of celery" means six whole heads, not six ribs. The peppers are sweet green bell peppers, not chillies. The cucumbers should be small pickling types, not waxed slicers.
- Keeping itThe recipe gives no processing instructions at all. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle and use it within a month or two, or follow a current tested water-bath procedure for pickle relish if you intend to shelf-store it.
- ServingThis is a condiment for cold meat, ham, sausage and beans, spooned out by the tablespoon rather than eaten as a salad.
Chow-chow is the English-language name for a mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickle that turns up across the nineteenth-century Anglophone world, from Pennsylvania Dutch farm kitchens to the American South to Nova Scotia. The name is generally traced to Chinese pidgin English, where "chow-chow" meant a mixture or a preserve of mixed things, and it seems to have reached British and American tables through the same trade routes that brought other Anglo-Indian and China-coast pickles into Victorian cookery. Its practical purpose is plainer than its etymology: the ingredient list here is a list of what a northern garden has left when frost is coming, green tomatoes above all, which will never ripen and are too sour to eat otherwise. Books like The Home Cook Book, compiled from contributed recipes by named local women, are full of these large-batch autumn pickles because a household that put up three gallons of chow-chow had relish for cold meat all winter.