Chowder
Two dozen large green tomatoes, two dozen large green cucumbers, one cabbage, six bunches celery, one dozen onions, six green peppers or less chopped fine. Stand seven hours, then put in colander and drain; take one quart water and one quart of vinegar and when boiling hot, put in the mixture and cook fifteen minutes. Drain well and put in jar. Take one gallon of vinegar, three pounds light brown sugar, one-half pound white mustard seed, two tablespoonfuls of ground mustard. Scald all together and pour over mixture. Put in glass cans with a small piece of horseradish in each jar.
This is a chow-chow style mixed pickle, not a soup, and it is built on a scale meant for a cellar shelf rather than a refrigerator. Two things need attention before you start: the missing salt and the missing canning process.
- The salt the recipe forgot"Stand seven hours, then put in colander and drain" only makes sense if the chopped vegetables have been salted; nothing drains otherwise. Layer the chopped vegetables with about 1/2 cup pickling salt per gallon of prepared vegetables, let them stand, then drain and rinse lightly.
- Scale and yieldTwo dozen tomatoes, two dozen cucumbers, a cabbage, six heads of celery and a dozen onions is a very large quantity, likely 30 lb or more of prepared vegetables, and needs the largest crock or preserving pan in the house. Quartering the whole recipe gives a more manageable batch.
- "Six bunches celery"A bunch means a whole head with its leaves, not six ribs. Six heads is a lot of celery; it is there for bulk and crunch as much as flavor.
- Green tomatoes and green cucumbers'Green' tomatoes are unripe, firm fruit at the end of the season; 'green' cucumbers here means fresh, firm, unyellowed ones. Ripe tomatoes will collapse into sauce during the fifteen-minute boil, and salad cucumbers with waxed skins go slack; look for pickling cucumbers and hard, pale green tomatoes.
- White mustard seedThis is ordinary yellow mustard seed, sold today as yellow rather than white. Half a pound is about 1 1/4 cups for the full batch.
- The fifteen-minute cookFifteen minutes in the water-and-vinegar blanch is enough to soften the onions and set the color; longer and the cabbage and celery lose their bite entirely. The vegetables finish in the hot sweet-sour syrup, so pull them while they still have resistance.
- "Glass cans"Period wording for glass canning jars with metal lids or bails. Modern Mason jars with two-piece lids are the direct equivalent.
- Sealing and storagePouring hot syrup into jars and screwing on the lid is not a seal by current standards, and this recipe gives no processing step at all. Follow a current tested procedure for pickle relish, which means a boiling-water bath of about 10-15 minutes for pints, or simply keep the finished pickle refrigerated and eat it within a couple of months.
- HorseradishThe recipe calls only for 'a small piece' of fresh root per jar; horseradish was traditionally held to help pickles keep as well as to add flavor.
Recipes titled "chowder" sometimes have nothing to do with soup; the word sits alongside chow-chow, chowchow and piccalilli as a loose name for a chopped, mustard-spiced mixed pickle, and the resemblance of the two words seems to have kept the spelling alive in household manuscripts. Chow-chow itself is generally traced to the pidgin-English "chow," picked up through nineteenth-century trade, though the dish as it settled in American and Anglo-Indian kitchens is often linked to English piccalilli. Why it appears in a book of this vintage is easy enough to imagine: a household facing a frost with unripe tomatoes and cucumbers still on the vines had to turn them into something, and vinegar, brown sugar and mustard seed turned an unusable crop into a winter's worth of relish for cold meat and beans. The sheer size of the batch is the clearest sign of the period, written for a family that put up produce by the crock rather than the pint.