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Mustard Pickle
1 quart small cucumbers 1 quart large cucumbers, sliced or diced 2 quarts small pearl onions 1 quart green tomatoes, sliced 3 small heads cauli- 4 2 quarts small green tomatoes flower, torn apart 6 green peppers, cut in strips 2 quarts butter beans or celery cut in 2-inch pieces Prepare vegetables overnight and soak in a strong brine made by adding 2 cups of salt to each gallon of water. In the morning bring to the boiling point and let simmer until vegetables are tender. Drain thoroughly in a colander and cover with the following mustard dressing: Mix together 1¼ cups sugar. 4 tablespoons each flour and powdered mustard, 1/2 tablespoon turmeric, 1 teaspoon celery salt; add slowly 3 pints of hot vinegar; stir till smooth. Cook in double boiler till it thickens. Pour over hot vegetables; simmer for five minutes. Pack in hot, clean jars.
The need of tissue-building foods in the diet is a well understood fact and their principal source is meat. Among the various foods which may be used in place of meat are: Eggs, poultry, fish, game, cheese, milk, legumes, some cereals, and nuts.
There are other tissue-building foods than meat and they may be substituted for it in the diet. Eggs, cheese and milk are the chief ones. Whole grains and legumes, while not what are known as complete proteins, make a satisfactory substitute for meat when combined with eggs, cheese or milk. 6 eggs 6 tablespoons milk
A large-batch mustard pickle of the kind that filled a cellar shelf for the winter. The vegetable work is straightforward; the canning method at the end is the problem, and it is the reason this one should be read rather than followed.
- Open-kettle packing is the failure pointThe recipe ends by packing hot pickle into hot jars with no boiling-water processing and no sealing instruction. That method relies on the heat of the food alone to sterilise the jar and pull a vacuum, and it is no longer considered adequate: seals fail silently and the jars can spoil without any visible sign.
- The flour thickener changes the riskFour tablespoons of flour turn the vinegar dressing into a thick, starchy sauce clinging to whole cucumbers, cauliflower and beans. Thick, dense mixtures conduct heat poorly, so the centre of the jar never reaches the temperature the surface does. Starch-thickened pickles are specifically discouraged in current preserving guidance for exactly this reason.
- Acidity is not controlledThree pints of vinegar are spread across roughly eight to ten quarts of vegetables, much of it low-acid (onions, cauliflower, butter beans), all of it pre-soaked and simmered in brine and then drained. No vinegar strength is specified. There is no way to know from the text whether the finished pack sits safely below pH 4.6, which is the line that matters for shelf storage.
- Butter beans in particularLima or butter beans are a dense low-acid vegetable and are among the harder things to preserve safely at home. In an unprocessed, thickened, sealed jar they are the ingredient most likely to support growth of Clostridium botulinum.
- If you want mustard pickleUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service, which will specify vinegar strength, jar size and processing time. This page is worth reading for the vegetable proportions and the character of the dressing, not as a canning procedure.
- Missing turmeric quantityThe dressing calls for "tablespoon turmeric" with no number attached, so the intended amount cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- The brine strengthTwo cups of salt to a gallon of water is roughly a 12 to 15 percent brine, depending on how coarse the salt is, and a genuinely strong overnight soak; it draws water out of the vegetables and also holds them while they wait. The recipe does not say which salt to use.
- YieldThe vegetables alone come to something like eight to ten quarts before draining. This was a day's work for a household putting up a winter's supply, not a small-batch recipe.
Mustard pickle, sometimes sold as piccalilli or chow-chow depending on the region and the cut of the vegetables, was one of the standard American "mixed pickles" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: whatever the garden gave up at the end of the season, held in a bright yellow mustard-and-turmeric sauce. The turmeric is there mainly for colour, the flour for body, and the mustard for the sharpness that gives the pickle its name. The accompanying note on tissue-building foods reflects the language of protein and food chemistry that home economists were bringing into household manuals in the early twentieth century.