Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Mixed Pickles
Mixed Pickles
Mrs. F. M. Cragin.
Three hundred small cucumbers, four green peppers sliced fine, two large or three small heads cauliflower, fine, two large or three small heads cauliflower, three heads of white cabbage shaved fine, nine large onions sliced, one large root horse-radish, one quart of green beans cut one inch long, one quart green tomatoes sliced; put this mixture in a pretty strong brine twentyfour hours; drain three hours, then sprinkle in onefourth pound black and one-fourth pound of white mustard seed; also one tablespoon black ground pepper; let it come to a good boil in just vinegar enough to cover it , adding a little alum. Drain again, and when cold, mix in one-half pint of ground mustard; cover the whole with good cider vinegar; add turmeric enough to colour, if you like.
A crock-scale pickle from an era when a household put up produce by the bushel. Everything here works at one-tenth the quantity, and the proportions are what matter.
- Scale it downThree hundred small cucumbers plus three cabbages, nine onions and two cauliflowers is a crock-scale batch, far beyond any domestic pan. Divide every ingredient by eight or ten for a batch that fits a stockpot and a refrigerator shelf.
- "Pretty strong brine"The original assumes you know it. A workable reading is a brine that will float a fresh egg, commonly given as about 1 to 1 1/2 cups pickling salt per gallon of water. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt clouds the liquid and can darken the vegetables.
- The alumAdded as a crisping agent for the boiling vinegar stage. Potassium alum is still sold but is no longer recommended, since it contributes little firmness to a fresh-pack pickle and gives an astringent edge. Chilling the cucumbers and trimming the blossom end does more for crispness.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely. Use a commercial cider vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity for both the boil and the final covering, and do not dilute it. Acidity is the whole preservative here.
- Mustard, ground and seedA quarter pound each of black and white mustard seed is about 3/4 cup of each; "one-half pint of ground mustard" is a full cup of dry mustard powder, which is a great deal and is what gives this its heat. Whisk the powder to a paste with a little of the cold vinegar before stirring it through, or it clumps.
- TurmericA tablespoon or two per gallon is plenty for the familiar yellow. It stains everything it touches, including plastic containers and wooden spoons.
- The boil is brief"Let it come to a good boil" means exactly that, then off the heat. Cauliflower and beans held at a boil for more than a minute or two turn soft and the finished pickle goes limp.
- StorageThis is a crock pickle, not a canned one: there is no processing step and no headspace measurement. Pack it into clean jars, keep it fully submerged in vinegar, and refrigerate. It improves after a week or two and keeps for a couple of months cold.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the first great wave of North American charity cookbooks, compiled from the contributed receipts of named local women and sold to fund a benevolent institution. Mrs. Cragin's attribution at the head of the recipe is the whole point of the genre: these were reputations in print, and a woman's pickle was public property. The dish itself is the family of mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickles that English cooks called piccalilli and American cooks increasingly called chow-chow, generally traced back to the Anglo-Indian taste for bright yellow mustard pickles that came home with the East India trade. Its scale is the real historical document here: three hundred cucumbers, three cabbages and a quart each of green beans and green tomatoes is a September clear-out of the kitchen garden.