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Mustard Pickles
Equal quantities of small cucumbers, cauliflower picked into flowerets and small button onions. Keep them covered with salted water for twenty-four hours. In the morning scald the brine and dissolve in it a bit of alum the size of a nutmeg. Pour the boiling brine over the pickles. When cold, drain thoroughly and prepare as much vinegar as there were quarts of brine. To one quart of vinegar use one cupful of brown sugar, half cupful of flour and onequarter of a pound of Coleman's mustard. Boil the sugar and vinegar. Mix the flour and mustard and stir the boiling vinegar into it and when smooth, pour it over the pickles.
A fresh-pack mustard pickle in the English piccalilli line, thickened with flour rather than held in plain vinegar. A few of the measurements are given by eye and by brand, and the storage question is left open entirely.
- The brine is unspecifiedThe original just says "salted water." Period recipes for a 24-hour soak vary widely, from a moderate brine of roughly a cup of salt per gallon of water up to the much stronger "strong enough to float an egg" brine some books call for. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt can cloud the liquid.
- Alum "the size of a nutmeg"Roughly 2 teaspoons of powdered alum, and it is doing one job only: firming the cucumbers and cauliflower. It is optional. Chilling the vegetables in the drained brine, or simply using very fresh pickling cucumbers, gives crispness without it, and too much alum leaves an astringent aftertaste.
- Measure the brine to size the vinegar"As much vinegar as there were quarts of brine" means pour off and measure the liquid you drained, then use that many quarts of vinegar. Use 5 percent cider or white vinegar, and do not dilute it: household vinegar of this period was not consistently standardized in strength.
- Colman's mustardColeman's is Colman's, the English dry mustard powder, still sold in the yellow tin. A quarter pound is about 1 cup of the powder per quart of vinegar, which makes a fierce, sinus-clearing sauce. Half that is closer to modern taste.
- The hinge: build the paste, then cook itThe hinge: build the paste, then add the liquid -- Mix flour and mustard dry and whisk the boiling sweetened vinegar into them a little at a time. The original pours the sauce over the pickles as soon as it is smooth; a few minutes over low heat will cook out the raw flour if you prefer. Added the other way round, the flour is liable to lump.
- Blanch the cauliflower and onionsThe scalded brine alone barely softens dense cauliflower stems and button onions. A two-minute boil in the brine, cucumbers added last, gives an evener texture; longer and the cauliflower goes to mush in the jar.
- Storage, not canningThe recipe gives no jar-sealing or processing step, and a flour-thickened sauce is not something to water-bath can: the starch blocks heat penetration and dilutes the acid. Treat this as a refrigerator pickle, jarred and kept cold, and eat it within a couple of months. For a shelf-stable version, follow a current tested recipe.
- YieldEqual parts of the three vegetables to about 4 quarts total makes roughly 4 quarts of finished pickle. The sauce should coat the vegetables, not swim over them; make it a little slack, as it thickens on cooling.
Mustard pickle of this kind is an American relative of English piccalilli, which is generally traced to eighteenth-century English attempts at the mixed, spiced Indian-style pickles known through the East India trade. Versions were common in American cookbooks by the turn of the twentieth century, sometimes under the name chow-chow, and the combination of cucumber, cauliflower and button onion in a mustard-and-flour sauce recurs often enough to look standard. The brand name is suggestive rather than precisely dating: Colman's of Norwich, milling mustard flour since 1814, was widely recommended to American housekeepers, and calling for it by name specified heat and fineness at a time when loose grocery mustard was commonly padded with turmeric and flour. The long salt soak and the pinch of alum belong to the same period's preoccupation with crispness in pickles.