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India Pickle
Mrs. George Simpson.
Take three quarts vinegar, quarter pound mustard, half ounce black pepper, one ounce cloves, one ounce allspice , one ounce turmeric, one ounce ginger, one ounce cayenne pepper, handful salt, same of sugar boil for twenty minutes. When cold put in the vegetables and cover closely ; if the liquid should become thin, boil again and add more mustard in three weeks after making.
A classic mixed "India pickle" brine of the piccalilli family, given as a liquid only — the vegetables are left entirely to the cook. A few things need filling in before it works.
- The hinge: salt the vegetables firstThe recipe puts raw vegetables straight into cold spiced vinegar, which is how you get limp pickles and a watery brine. Cut cauliflower, small cucumbers, pearl onions, green beans or green tomatoes, layer them with coarse salt or hold them in a heavy brine overnight, then drain and dry them well before packing. Most of the "liquid should become thin" trouble the recipe anticipates comes from vegetable water diluting the vinegar.
- How much vegetableThree quarts of pickling liquid will cover roughly 4 to 5 lb of prepared vegetables packed into jars or a crock. Everything must stay submerged; a small weight or a folded cabbage leaf helps.
- MustardA quarter pound is dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard — about a cup. It both flavours and thickens, which is why more is stirred in later if the brine slackens.
- "Handful salt, same of sugar"Genuinely imprecise. A generous 1/4 cup of each is a reasonable reading for three quarts. Use pickling or kosher salt: iodised table salt can cloud the brine and darken the vegetables.
- The cayenneAn ounce of cayenne in three quarts is fierce by modern palates, and nineteenth-century cayenne was not necessarily of the same strength or purity as what is sold now. A teaspoon or two is closer to most people's tolerance; the turmeric is there for colour more than heat.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 percent cider or malt vinegar and do not dilute it. Weak or homemade vinegar of unknown acidity is the one substitution that turns this from a preserve into a science experiment.
- Cool completely"When cold put in the vegetables" is deliberate. Hot brine poured over raw vegetables cooks them soft; the twenty-minute boil is for extracting the spices, not for scalding the pickle.
- StorageTreat this as a refrigerator or cool-cellar pickle in clean covered jars, and eat it within a few months. It is not a tested canning recipe — do not water-bath process and store it on a shelf on the strength of these instructions. It needs at least the three weeks the recipe implies before it tastes of anything but raw vinegar.
"India pickle" is the older English name for what most cooks now call piccalilli — a mixed vegetable pickle in a mustard-and-turmeric brine, generally traced to eighteenth-century British attempts to reproduce the achars encountered in India. Early cookbooks spell it variously as paco-lilla or piccalillo, and the recipes share this one's shape: a heavily spiced vinegar, a large quantity of dry mustard, turmeric for the yellow, and whatever hard vegetables the garden gave up at the end of the season. By the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s, the dish had been thoroughly domesticated into North American preserving practice, contributed by name from one household to the next — hence Mrs. George Simpson's version, which assumes every reader already knows which vegetables go in and needs only the recipe for the liquid.