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Pickled Cauliflower
Two cauliflowers, cut up one pint of small onions, three medium-sized red peppers. Dissolve half pint of salt in water enough to cover the vegetables and let these stand over night. In the morning drain them. Heat two quarts of vinegar with four tablespoonfuls of Coleman's mustard until it boils. Add the vegetables and boil for about twenty minutes, or until a fork can be thrust through the cauliflower.
A straightforward mustard-vinegar pickle of the type that filled the pickle chapter of every turn-of-the-century American cookbook. The instructions assume you know how to fill and cover jars, since the book expects the pickle to be eaten within weeks rather than stored on a shelf for a year.
- The overnight salting is the hingeThe brine draws water out of the cauliflower and onions so they stay firm in the vinegar. Skip or shorten it and the finished pickle is limp and the vinegar tastes diluted. Drain well in the morning; there is no need to rinse unless you want a less salty result.
- Half a pint of saltThat is one cup by volume, roughly 5-10 oz depending on the grain. Use pickling or kosher salt rather than iodized table salt, whose additives can cloud the brine. "Water enough to cover" for two heads plus a pint of onions will likely be 2-3 quarts.
- Coleman's mustardColman's dry English mustard powder, sold in the yellow tin then as now. Four tablespoons of it is the whole seasoning of the pickle, so a fresh tin matters; old mustard powder goes flat and dusty.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5 percent cider or white distilled vinegar. Period vinegar varied in strength, and some household vinegar was weaker, so a pickle like this was safest treated as a short-keeping one rather than long-storage goods.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes is long -- Cauliflower florets in boiling vinegar are cooked through in about 5 to 8 minutes, and the recipe's own test, a fork thrust through, is met well before twenty. Boiled the full time they go very soft. Cook to just tender and stop.
- The peppersThree medium red peppers most likely means fresh sweet red peppers, seeded and cut in strips, rather than dried chiles, though the recipe does not say. They are for color and sweetness as much as anything; add them in the last few minutes so they hold shape.
- StorageAs written this is a refrigerator pickle. Pack hot into clean jars, cover with the hot vinegar, cool and refrigerate; it keeps a month or more and improves after a few days. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure rather than this one, which gives no processing time.
- YieldAbout three quarts, depending on the size of the heads. Two average cauliflowers run 4-5 lb untrimmed.
Mustard pickles were the workhorse of the American and British pickle shelf in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: cauliflower, small onions and peppers held in a sharp vinegar sluiced with dry mustard, the same family that produces piccalilli and chow-chow. The named brand is telling. Colman's of Norwich, generally dated to 1814, had made its finely milled mustard flour a pantry staple on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is that product a cook of this period would have reached for. The overnight salting, the boiling vinegar and the reliance on vinegar as the preservative all belong to a kitchen where pickles were a way of stretching the autumn garden through winter.