Chow Chow
From a head of cauliflower trim the leaves and divide into small branches; string one quart of string beans; peel one quart of button onions. Boil each of these separately until tender. Wash one quart of little cucumbers and soak in a strong brine for twenty-four hours. Measure two quarts of vinegar; use a portion of it to mix a half pound of ground Coleman's mustard and one-quarter of an ounce of turmeric to a smooth paste and heat the remainder in an agate kettle. When boiling add to it the prepared paste and stir until it thickens; then add two tablespoonfuls of white mustard seed, one-half pound of sugar and one cupful of olive oil; cook for a moment longer; then pour over the vegetables which have been mixed and packed in glass or stone jars. .
A mustard pickle of the English piccalilli type, thickened with dry mustard rather than flour. The proportions are generous and the method is sound; most of what needs translating is vessels, brine strength and storage.
- Mix the mustard to a paste firstThe half pound of ground mustard must be slaked with cold or barely warm vinegar into a lump-free paste before it meets the boiling vinegar. Tipped in dry it seizes into knots that never smooth out, and heat set on dry mustard powder turns it flat and bitter.
- Agate kettleAgateware is enamelled iron or steel, and an enamelled or otherwise non-reactive pan is what an acid mixture like this wants; vinegar reacts with bare iron, copper and aluminium. Use stainless steel, enamelled cast iron or a modern enamel pan.
- "A strong brine"The book gives no proportion. One common modern proportion for a 24-hour crisping soak is about 1 cup of pickling salt to 1 gallon of water, though a period "strong brine" was often considerably stronger. Use non-iodised salt; anti-caking agents can cloud the liquor. Drain and rinse the cucumbers before packing.
- Coleman's mustardColman's dry mustard powder, still sold in the yellow tin, is a blend of brown and white mustard flour. Half a pound is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups and gives a fierce, sinus-clearing pickle; two-thirds of that is closer to modern taste.
- Boil each vegetable separately, and brieflySeparate cooking is about timing, not ceremony: cauliflower florets want 3-4 minutes, string beans 4-5, button onions 6-8. "Tender" here should mean just yielding. Anything cooked to softness collapses in the vinegar over the next month.
- The cucumbers stay rawOnly the brined cucumbers go into the jars uncooked, which is what keeps any crunch in the finished pickle. Small pickling cucumbers, 2-3 inches, not salad cucumbers.
- TurmericA quarter ounce is about 2 rounded teaspoons of ground turmeric. It is there for the yellow as much as the flavour; it will stain wooden spoons and plastic permanently.
- Packing and storageThe sauce must cover the vegetables completely; the recipe has the hot dressing poured over the vegetables already packed in the jars. It includes no boiling-water processing, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle: cool, cap and keep cold, using it within a couple of months. For shelf-stable jars, follow current tested processing times for mustard pickles.
- YieldThis is a large batch: a head of cauliflower plus three quarts of other vegetables and two quarts of thickened dressing. It improves after two or three weeks in the cold.
Chow chow is the American name for a mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickle, and it sits somewhere between English piccalilli and the Indian-influenced mixed pickles that reached Britain through the East India trade; the name itself is generally traced to a Chinese-pidgin term for mixed relish that came into English through the treaty ports, though the dish as made here is thoroughly British in method. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks give dozens of versions, Northern ones built on cauliflower, beans and onions in mustard like this one, Southern ones often on green tomatoes and cabbage. The recipe names Colman's dry mustard outright, and calls for a half pound of it per batch.