This recipe is as old as the hills. I got it from a Bride Book given to my grandmother by her mother - my grandmother was born in the 1880s, so it probably dates at least from the 1860s. All I've done is update the measurements to metric. My grandmother always made it with brown (malt) vinegar because that's the only vinegar she knew about (and same with me until not so many years ago!).

Mustard Pickles
3kg vegetables (cauliflower, onions, beans, green tomatoes)
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons mustard powder
1 tablespoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 1/4 litres white vinegar
few ripe chillies or strips of red capsicum

To 2 litres of boiling water, add 1 cup salt. Pour over chopped vegetables and leave overnight. Drain. Mix mustard, spices and flour to a paste with some of the vinegar. Put remaining vinegar on to boil, add vegetables and boil about 4-5 minutes. Add the paste and as soon as it has thickened, it is ready to remove from heat. Pour into clean bottles, cool before putting on lids.

Looks like you missed my posts about mustard pickles.. I just made another batch here. I did NOT use flour as its not suitable for home canning. The mustard brine was made with a combination of white, cider, and white wine vinegar, mostly white. I grind up both yellow and brown mustard seeds and simmer about half a cup of the ground up seeds in about 2 quarts of vinegar. I use a coffee grinder to do the mustard seeds. After an hour, its cooled and strained of most of the larger bits. Then I add a few tablespoons of dry ground mustard powder, a whole jar of yellow mustard, tumeric, pickling salt, sugar (or for me Splenda). I do not add any hot things like cayenne, curry, or chillies. I do add some ground up celery seeds though. The mustard brine is tasted and adjusted for flavor, salt, and sugar. The veggies I use are sweet red peppers cut into pieces, sweet green peppers, cucumbers cut into small pieces, cauliflower, and small whole onions. I also add a bit of dried granulated garlic. As a final ingredient before adding all the veggies to the boiling mustard, I add CLEAR JEL to thicken it a little, but not too much. The veggies tend to exude water and so the mustard will get a bit watery, so I usually add a little extra Clear Jel so it will hold up better. Right now, I have been using part of a sample of Prima 300 starch that was shipped to me from National Starch company. I was told by them its also suitable for home canning and will hold up better than flour or other starches for a high acid vinegar brine. If the mustard pickles were hot, then I suspect that the maker used a similar recipe as above. But if you look in the Ball Blue Book, the mustard pickles are similar to the way I do it, except for making that long simmering mustard vinegar brine at the beginning. Right now, after canning all the mustard pickles, I have almost a half gallon of the mustard sauce ready for another batch, or use on its own for any kind of mustard lover. I found that if I add the cut up veggies and allow the mixture to boil again, that it helps to shrink up the veggies a little so you just don't end up with all sauce and no chunks. FIlling is a bit different too, as I push down on the contents to force mor of the veggies into each jar, while also spooning out some of the extra mustard. I even use a slotted spoon to fill the jars.

Hello Zabby,

I think you have "Small-Batch Preserving" and there's a Cauliflower Chow-Chow in Topp's book you might like to try that seems to come very close to what you want.

Also, in the Bernardin Book there's a Chunky Mustard Pickle and a Marrow 'N Onion Mustard Pickle; as with Daisy's recipe, you could easily substitute a mixture of vegetables for the cucumbers or zucchini and onion specified in the recipes.

I'll be happy to post any of these if needed.

Then in Chesman's "Pickles and Relishes" I found this recipe, which to me sounds spot on for what you describe. She says the recipes in this latest edition have been updated to USDA standards and when I compared it to the Bernardin recipes the proportions and processing instructions were comparable. This recipe calls for more vinegar and wet mustard, so it is less dense.

I like the cider vinegar in this recipe as opposed to distilled in the others. And if you can find malt vinegar, as Daisy mentioned, it would be worth a shot. For some reason malt vinegar is very difficult to locate here; small bottles only and prohibitively expensive for pickling. I did finally locate a gallon of Four Monks brand. I don't know if I'll ever get that lucky again. But now I can make Branston pickle this fall.

Two-Day Mustard Pickles

Yield: 5-6 Quarts

1 head cauliflower (about 1 1/2 quarts) broken into flowerets
1 quart small white onions, peeled
1 quart small cucumbers, sliced
1 quart small green tomatoes
2 large green peppers, chopped and seeded (2 cups)
2 large sweet red peppers, chopped and seeded (2 cups)
3 quarts cold water
1/2 cup pickling salt
2 quarts cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups light brown sugar
2/3 cup flour
6 tablespoons prepared mustard
2 tablespoons turmeric

First Day: Prep vegetables, place in a large bowl and cover with a brine made of the water and salt. Cover and let sit for 24 hours.

Second Day: Drain salt solution, catching vegetables in a colander and solution in a saucepan. Heat solution to voiling and pour over the vegetables in the colander. Let vegetables drain; discard salt solution.

Combine vinegar, brown sugar, flour, mustard and turmeric. Stir, then heat gradually, stirring constantly until mixture is thick and smooth. Add drained vegetables and cook gently until tender but still retain individuality. Stir with heavy wooden spoon to prevent scorching.

Pack into clean, hot pint jars, leaving 1/2" headspace. Process BWB 15 minutes (20 minutes 1,001-6,000 feet; 25 minutes above 6,000 feet).

I think I'm going to make this, a half recipe at least.

Carol

Wow, thanks, guys! I think I'll try them all, though I'm willing to go with flour as a thickener; I am sure that's what my friend's mom would've used. THe ones I had weren't at all hot, but I like spicier stuff too, and will maybe try some zingier a la Ken. Though BF doesn't much like anything pickled, so I can't go too crazy as I'll be the only one eating it.... I don't go in for relishes in a huge way, myself, but there was something about this stuff that really appealed to me. For 2 days I found myself compelled to try it as an accompaniement to pretty much everything I ate, and it always seemed to go great! Meat pies from the pastry house... ham sandwiches... leftover pasta.... THen it was all gone!

Zabby, who gets to go HOME tomorrow and see her garden after TEN DAYS --- I bet I'll have a pumpkin or two almost full size, and a whole basket o' tomatoes!!!

Zabby

There are a few tested recipes that do use flour as a thickener. Both the Bernardin recipes call for flour, and I'm referring to the most recent Bernardin book. Ellie Topp's recipe also calls for flour, and it's a highly reliable source. It's like oil in pickled peppers; some approved recipes out there do call for oil in limited amounts.

Even if that weren't the case, I have to say that if you take low-acid vegetables and "float them" in mustard and pure vinegar it's darned hard to imagine anything nasty surviving in that environment, flour or not.

As an alternative, ClearJel could be used, and somewhere around here I do have a similar recipe that calls for it instead. Somehow, though, in this application ClearJel sounds less appealing.

Carol

Yes, a Clear Jel is a modified food starch that seems to be safer to use in canning. If it were safe, I bet most pie fillings would use flour, but they don't. Commercially, modified food starch is used as a thickener in most products that need a thickener of some kind. With a half cup of flour in that recipe above, its going to be hard to avoid it if you need a thickener. I do NOT pressure can mine, and even for that, the mustard pickle recipes don't either, as far as I know. Recipes in books, even if just recently published, can still have bad examples of recipes. If the flour added was only a tablespoon, I wouldn't be concerned, just like a very small amount of a fat, oil or butter. But we are talking about thickening a liquid, which obviously needs more than a small amount, which can change the density and offer all kinds of variables in canning. I would have expected Linda Lou to post here, saying that the flour should not be used. Less appealing as it might be, Clear Jel is still a far superior and more stable product used to thicken foods in home canning.

Well, the Bernardin book is the Canadian "Ball Blue Book". If it's unsafe, we're all in trouble.

Carol

Some time ago, I made some ketchup from a commercial mix. Its ingredients were clearly not showing any flour as a thickener, but instead it had a 'modified food starch' as part of the mix. This was meant to absorb the watery stuff that settles to the top. I still feel that flour isn't safe. Anyone ever use pasta in home canning? Thats flour, and its made into a paste, but as far as I know, we cannot process or home can any pasta safely. I think that because many people are still in the dark about the newer, more stable food starches, Ball probably felt that it was necessary to give a more generalized ingredient like flour instead. Clear Jel is home canning friendly, as is many other modified food starches. Regular corn starch isn't really suitable either as it will quickly break down with any added acids in the foods, and then it seperates

Usually the complaint about Ball is they're overly obsessed with safety. It's kind of refreshing to hear the reverse.

That's the nice thing about home-preserving. We all get to do what we want.

Carol

At least we can get really creative. This is the main reason I don't use recipes very much. Heck, I make bread dough all the time, and have never referred to any recipe. Same with many other foods I make. Hamburgers with cheese INSIDE the center of the meat., great on the grill and are not the least bit messy or leaky.

Ken, nobody's asking you to use flour if you don't want to. But for heaven's sake, don't say the recipe isn't safe. That's just silly. It's in the Bernardin book. Bernardin is owned by Ball.

Zabby

Check with Linda Lou.. I am sure that she would also agree that flour isn't really suitable for a canning thickener. In all the packaged mixes that use thickners, they have a modified food starch listed. Flour, unless you cook it very well, will also leave an aftertaste. Here, I used up the rest of my mustard sauce and finely chopped up cucumbers and onions to make a big batch of hot dog relish. You may think that because I am using a steam canner that that method is also unsafe, but thats one more reason I do, as I go the extra measure to make the foods safer to begin with prior to processing in the steam canner.

Chiming in here a bit late but for future searchers, the Ball blue book 2013 edition (page 50) calls for flour in some recipes, such as Mustard Pickles. See attached scan for proof.

And the NCHFP says you can add flour to corn relish.

http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_06/pickled_corn_relish.html

So clearly flour is approved by the "powers that be" for a few approved applications. I wish they'd give us the reasoning behind it, but they never do, sigh :>

Mustard pickles were one of my favorites that my mother would put up. I remember her using flour, green beans, tiny cucs, pearl onions, cauliflower (my favorite), and red pepper. We stopped using her recipe when we were advised against using flour. Even though I have clear gel now and use it per recipe ingredient... I just may pull out her old recipe check it out in comparison to the recipes posted. Thanks for the discussion and information.

I think you may have been advised against it well-meaningly, but in error, sadly :) Everyone has been repeating that advice without actually checking on it from the "authoritative sources" that we have.

May I ask where you got your clear gel from? Would be really keen to know.

When flour was no longer acceptable for canning it was "blanketed" advice and I was unaware of clear gel options. I have been making a refrigerator mustard pickle recipe (no thickeners) which is great but t does take up a lot of space in the fridge. I think I'll make up a batch of the water bathed variety this next year.

I was ready to purchase clear gel on line but to my surprise I was able to purchase it from a local health food store...

Local health food store?! PING! Hadn't thought of trying there, I have two within 5 minutes walk on my place here in the Beaches! Am gonna try and if they don't have, will suggest that they order lol. I don't know to buy from Golda's online: the shipping is horrendous, and they are not nice people, period. Thank you!

I am going to make a double batch of the mustard pickle tomorrow using the Ball recipe -- with flour lol. I know some Maritimers that will be happy to see it in their Christmas stockings.

@canfan, I just thought of something -- it's sort of a bit like all those years peolple went without a single egg, because we were blanket told eggs were bad for us.

Good luck RandalO.... I wouldn't mind being a Maritimer right now ;)

Ya... I remember the ... eggs are bad decade. I did not like it at all... and felt guilty every time I ate two with my hash browns... ;)