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Cucumber Salad
Mrs. King.
Take a dozen ripe "white spine" cucumbers; wash, pare, and cut into strips, taking out the seeds; cut into pieces, like small dice; to each dozen cucumbers take twelve large white onions chopped; six large green peppers, also chopped ; \one-quarter pound each of black and white mustard seed, and a gill of celery seed; mix all well together; add a teacup of salt, and hang up in a cotton bag to drain for twenty-four hours. Then add enough clear cold vinegar to cover it; put into stone jars and fasten nearly air-tight. In six weeks it will be fit for use. Excellent.
Despite the name, this is not a salad in the modern sense but an uncooked, vinegar-cured relish of the chow-chow family, meant to be put down in quantity and eaten through the winter. The hinge is the drain: twenty-four hours in the salt bag pulls out the water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar and leave the jar slack and soft.
- Scale and yieldA dozen cucumbers plus a dozen onions is a big batch — roughly 6 to 8 quarts of finished relish. Quartering the recipe (3 cucumbers, 3 onions, 1 to 2 peppers, about 2 ounces total mustard seed — roughly half a cup — and 2 tablespoons celery seed) gives about a quart and a half.
- Gill and teacupA gill is half a cup, so a full 4 ounces of celery seed by volume. A teacup in this period runs 6 to 8 fluid ounces; for salt, figure about three-quarters of a cup. Use pickling or kosher salt — iodized table salt clouds the brine.
- White spine cucumbersA leading 19th-century American slicing variety, named for the colour of the spines on the fruit. Any firm slicing or pickling cucumber works; avoid waxed supermarket cucumbers, and take the seeds out as directed since "ripe" here means fully grown and seedy, not soft.
- Black and white mustard seedWhite mustard is sold today as yellow mustard seed; black is close enough to the brown seed on most spice shelves. A quarter pound of each is a quarter pound each — this relish is meant to be sharp.
- Green peppersOrdinary green bell peppers, not chiles; in recipes of this kind "large green peppers" generally means the sweet sort, and a hot pepper would overwhelm the batch.
- The draining bagA double layer of cheesecloth in a colander over a bowl does the same work as a hung cotton bag. Do not rinse the vegetables afterward; the residual salt is part of the preservation.
- Vinegar strengthUse undiluted 5 percent cider or white vinegar and make certain every piece stays submerged — the vegetables will want to float. Weight them with a small plate or a brine-filled bag.
- Storage, adjusted"Stone jars, fastened nearly air-tight" was a cool cellar arrangement. Keep this in the refrigerator in clean glass jars instead: it is an unheated, unprocessed pickle with no measured acidity, so it is not shelf-stable by current standards. Six weeks of cold curing still develops the flavor.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women, with proceeds going to a charitable home — which is why nearly every entry carries a donor's name, here Mrs. King. Contributed collections like this one are often said to be where the American chopped-vegetable pickle enters print in force: cucumber, onion and pepper cut small, salted and drained, then covered with cold spiced vinegar, a formula that circulated under the names chow-chow, mixed pickle and, as here, cucumber salad. The mustard-and-celery-seed combination became a fixture of this style of relish. "White spine" points to how specific 19th-century seed catalogues were about varieties; it was among the most widely grown American cucumbers of the era, and a cook could name it and expect to be understood.