Canning Piccalilli for Lilly

Part 1



I know lots of people who can foods around this time of year, but I had never done it myself before last Sunday. I'm pretty game for tackling new culinary techniques, even ones with a risk of botulism attached to them, but this was one thing I wanted somebody to hold my hand on the first time I did it. It's one thing to inspect a piece of coppa to see what's growing on it, sniffing and poking it yourself, but another to peer into a sealed jar wondering what life and death might be growing inside it.

The estimable Cathy2 is a hardcore canner and, frankly, someone who takes the Jack Webb approach to canning, the rules exist to be followed exactly, just the USDA regs ma'am. So there could have been no better guide for my first foray into canning.

So what got me canning this year? Well, that's a little bit of a family historical tale.

I've posted and even given talks based on the cooking of one side of my family, my mom's German Mennonite side. I don't believe I've ever mentioned the other side, my dad's— and at first glance there'd seem to be a reason for that. They were Irish Catholics, not a group noted for fine cuisine, and they were in Kansas in the middle of the 20th century. Steak, meatloaf, hamloaf— that's pretty much what I remember them eating, and they ate it out as often as they did at home. They had an active social life right up until most of their friends had died, and my dad summed it up with a story he liked to tell about when he was first in the Marine Corps and the recruits were getting a little maudlin about their silver-haired mamas slavin' over a hot stove. My dad replied that he could see his silver-haired mama slaving over... a hot game of bridge.



Yet Lillian Gebert (nee Davison) was a very good cook for her day, and my mom made sure to save her recipe box when we cleaned out her house (she died in 1990). And surprisingly, though her side didn't come from a farming background within living memory (her dad was an executive with a department store), she was the one who occasionally made things to can. If she ever canned fruit or vegetables, I don't remember it, but there were two condiments she made every year as long as she could: honey mustard and piccalilli sauce.

I've never felt a need to make the honey mustard— commercial products like East Shore taste exactly like I remember it— but the piccalilli has long been a mystery, tantalizing me. What is piccalilli, you ask? Well, that's part of the problem: it's a lot of things. Search for "piccalilli recipe" and you will find quite a range of preserved condiments seemingly with little beyond the idea of pickling in common. At one end it's a British pickle with a distinct Indian influence, much like chow chows and chutneys; here's a good example of this kind of British piccalilli, cauliflower and cucumber in a pickle turned bright yellow with turmeric.

Since the name is almost certainly British, that's probably where it began, but it came to mean something rather different in the American South. Basically, in America it's a green tomato relish, and became something of a traditional way to use up any green tomatoes still clinging to the vine when winter hit. You might find things like cabbage in it still (as in this recipe), but basically it was a sweet-sour relish made of green tomatoes and green and red peppers, with notes of spices like cinnamon and allspice or cloves.

As the cloves suggest, it goes well on ham, and in fact that's pretty much all I ever did with it as a kid, put it on ham sandwiches. I'm sort of curious now what else you might do with it. Yet even if my use of it was not terribly sophisticated, it was a pretty bold taste for an 8 or 10 year old to develop a love for, and was probably one of the first genuinely complex things I really appreciated.



So I opened Lilly's old recipe box, found the recipe, and... nope. It didn't work that way. The one recipe I wanted was, of course, the one that wasn't in there. (I have to wonder if, stupidly, I didn't pull it from the box some years ago, and put it somewhere that it will never be found.) Instead, I had to do some detective work, trying to piece together what was Lilly's likely recipe based on the tastes and recipes of the time.

I made some suppositions based on memory. It definitely had cinnamon, and I remembered her spending some hours stewing it, so that suggested cinnamon sticks; this was the 60s and 70s, so it probably didn't have any heat to it, no more than ketchup does. I doubted that she used green tomatoes, that's a Southern thing we really didn't know in Kansas much, and she might not have even had red peppers— the color of hers was probably a mix of red tomatoes and the ubiquitous green bell pepper. Clearly it was vinegar-based, both by what I remembered of the taste and because it would need it for preserving, and that obviously implied a lot of sugar and some salt to balance.

Online and in one of Cathy's many, many vintage midwestern cookbooks, I found a couple of recipes I felt looked right, close enough that I could wing something of my own and make adjustments during the cooking process. Cathy and I picked Sunday to do the canning, and so I set out Saturday with one son driving toward DeKalb, looking for farmstands (I was using enough that it was worth driving out into the country versus paying city farmer's market prices).

* * *

I chose that direction because I knew another place in the area I wanted to try: Ream's Market, in Elburn. Elburn is a small town about 15 minutes beyond the edge of Chicago suburbia, and Ream's is a great little old school butcher shop that answers the question what you do for fun in Elburn: you make sausage all day long. They have an amazing number of different kinds of sausage, most of the bratwurst variety (I picked up a South African style called Boerewors) but including some dry cured salamis (I bought some little finocchino, which are excellent). Not suprisingly, Ream's is the hub of activity on a Saturday afternoon in Elburn and luckily for me and a hungry boy, there's a guy with a hot dog cart selling Ream's incredibly flavorful and smoothly-ground brats and housemade hot dogs.

We continued on Rt. 38 toward DeKalb and saw two farms with farmstands. I drove past the first one to one called Yaeger's, which had seemed appealing since it also claimed to have Halloween amusements (a corn maze, an inflatable jumping and climbing something or other). Fact was, though, it was pretty small and on a drizzly day, fun looked minimal. So we stuck to acquiring some tomatoes and some corn, plus one pumpkin. Doubling back, we hit the other stand (I don't remember the name but, hey, it's the other stand on Rt. 38 between Elburn and DeKalb) and found a much better range of produce. I bought a big box of Roma tomatoes for $12, and some beets as well (I've done refrigerator pickles of beets before, but I figured the Romas and the beets would give us something to can while the piccalilli was still stewing). That was all I really saw, this late in the season, that looked like the kinds of thing I'd like to have in my pantry. Relatively cheap produce acquired, we headed back to Chicago to await canning the next day.

Would my piccalilli match up to my memories of Lilly's?  Stay tuned for part 2.



Ream's Elburn Market
elburnmarket.com
128 N Main St
Elburn, IL 60119-9167
(630) 365-6461

Mike-

I'm anxiously awaiting Part 2. Part 1 was a great piece of writing.

-Mary

I second "The GP"!

Wonderful post, Mike.

And, it's given me ideas and inspiration for all of my green tomatoes that have been suffering the indignation of this past weeks' below-freezing nights.

What a great story! Looking forward to the rest. For future reference, here's a list of direct farmstands in Kane County.

http://www.kanecfb.com/bounty.html

Nice piece, especially on Ream's Elburn Market. I've been touting it anywhere I can for years.

It's a family business (Randy Ream's mother is usually still there) and the walls of the store are completely covered with awards, mostly for the bratwursts. ALL the sausages are spectacular. The meats are also top-notch. Don't miss the smoked pork chops.

Drive out to Elburn for a nice day's outing in the country. Go west on the Eisenhower and west on I88, go north on Randall Road to Roosevelt Road (there is no exit from I 88 to Route 46), and west to Route 46, and turn left into downtown Elburn. Take a cooler. There is a nice greasy spoon just around the corner from the Elburn Market called Knucklehead's with a really great greasy hamburger and a good selection of draft beers. The only thing they don't have is hot peppers, so if you like these on your burger, you need to bring your own.

Randy Ream, son of the founders and their master sausage-maker, supplies sausages - mostly bratwurst - to all the Rotary Clubs in northeast Illinois which use a sausage roast as a fundraiser. The Sandwich Rotary does this at every Sandwich Fair (over for this year) and has gotten their sausages from Ream's for years. So has my club, the Hinsdale Rotary, for the last twenty years or so. We do a hotdog stand every year at the Hinsdale Art Fair, a juried art show held every year on Father's Day weekend. I go out to Elburn a few days before the event and pick up the brats and hot dogs. Last year, I came back with 1,200 sausages, which we stored in a local retirement home walk-in which is run by a member of the club. They are pre-cooked (for safety) and frozen. Randy gives the Rotary customers a very favorble price, since they are charitable organizations.

Randy is a very good man. Go take a trip into the country and buy some meat and sausages from him. You won't be sorry.

Nice piece, Mike G! I'm also intreagued by the virgin territory of canning myself, but I have yet to go any farther than giardinara, which is more pickling than canning.

MikeLM, there actually has been some detailed discussion about Ream's in the past.

MikeLM wrote:
Drive out to Elburn for a nice day's outing in the country. Go west on the Eisenhower and west on I88, go north on Randall Road to Roosevelt Road (there is no exit from I 88 to Route 46), and west to Route 46, and turn left into downtown Elburn.

FWIW, there is no exit on I-88 at Randall Road. You must exit at Orchard Road and take Orchard north to Randall Road. At Main Street in Batavia you can go left and take Main Street to Route 47 (not 46), turn right (north) on 47 to Elburn. Reams is on the west side of the street. You can stay on Randall to Route 38 but there are a lot of stop lights and strip malls in the way. At intersection of Main Street and Route 47 is Fisherman's Inn, Blackberry Inn and a little sub shop, all good eats. Hit Blackberry Inn for a great breaded pork tenderloin sandwich.

Part 2

Now it was time to get to work, recreating my childhood memories— in the kitchen.



Before Cathy arrived to show me the ropes of canning, I did as much prep as I could. I started with the beets. Beets will benefit from almost any logical thing you do to give them a little savory flavor to soak up as you roast them; in this case I vaguely followed this Alton Brown recipe (though the time is never enough; mine roasted for a full hour), coating them in a little oil and tossing them with shallots and a little rosemary I plucked from a plant that never really grew in this weird summer's weather. But any herb and oniony flavor will be good, enhance their roasted beetiness.



Then I began peeling the tomatoes. Boil water, drop in till the skins start to split, toss into cold water in sink. Considering the half a bushel or whatever I had, it was fast work.



Then the beets went into their bath of vinegary solution. Cathy has a canning kit from Ball which is full of neat little plastic gizmos. The funnel is perfect for not spilling your precious farmstand goodies as you fill the jars...



And this device lets you stir air pockets out, then reverses to show you the height of the air space in your filled jar.



And into the steaming inferno they go, to emerge as shelf-stable, pickled beets.

How do you know how much to do some of these things, like the amount of vinegar, the time to boil, the height of air to leave in the jar? Take off your shoes, your Government has it all figured out for you! Just go here, a site actually maintained by the University of Georgia but paid for by your USDA tax dollars, and a few clicks will take you to instructions for the appropriate foodstuff. For instance, beets in a quart jar will take 35 minutes of boiling to be safely canned.

* * *



While the beets boil, I turn to the piccalilli. I puree 8 good sized tomatoes, then add 3 sweet red peppers, a yellow and two green peppers.



Add some onions and at this point what I have is a pretty nice salsa. I add some cinnamon sticks and allspice in a tea strainer, then half the final vinegar, and begin stewing it all. For the moment, it's as red as ajvar.



Meanwhile, the beets come out of the canning pot and next go in the Roma tomatoes. Even with lemon juice, they will take 85 minutes, which gives us plenty of time to fiddle with the piccalilli as it stews.



All along, I'm tasting and testing. The cinnamon and allspice begin to appear in the background, making it less like a bowl of stewed tomatoes and more like a sauce. Too much vinegar, but some sugar mellows it a bit, and salt balances the sugar. Slowly, addition by addition, taste by taste and test by test, I get closer to my grandmother's piccalilli, like a Polaroid slowly developing, revealing long-gone faces as familiar as if you'd seen them yesterday.



That's Lilly and her mother, who lived into the early 80s, almost to 100. Did the piccalilli recipe come from her? Or was it just something Lilly clipped from a magazine decades ago that she never thought of as a family tradition, and only became one to me because I associated it with her? I'll never know. (Well, unless I find the recipe card and it turns out to have the clipping stapled to it, I guess.)

Finally, after maybe two hours of stewing and adjusting, it tastes something like my childhood memories—the vinegar too strong still, but it will have a month or more in the jar to mellow. The color isn't an exact match; maybe she did have green tomatoes, after all, what I remember was definitely a mix of red, green and brown. Growing up, I never even knew there were such things as green tomatoes (that is, as an edible foodstuff) until I was 20 or so, but that doesn't mean Lilly didn't.

But the flavor is close, it excites neurons that haven't tasted this memory in 25 years. It's not exactly like being in her house again (for that, I'd have to light up a few Winstons), but it's like a surprisingly sharp picture of one part of it, reminding me of things I haven't thought of in years. (Of course, to really taste my piccalilli in all its Wichita-1978 glory, I'll need Wonder bread and Cure 81 ham.)



Just five minutes' boiling for piccalilli, surprisingly. Then a month or so to mellow.



Not at all a long wait, to have something again for the first time in 25 years. And to pass a little bit of the great-grandmother who died before they were born, to my two boys.


Lilly, my grandfather Al Gebert, my dad and my uncle, c. 1935.

Lilly's Piccalilli, Version 10.09
8 large ripe tomatoes or equivalent
3 sweet red peppers
3 bell peppers, green or yellow or orange
2 large onions or equivalent
1-3/4 cups sugar
3 cups cider vinegar
3-4 Tbsp salt, to taste
3 cinnamon sticks
1 dozen allspice berries, in cheesecloth bag or tea strainer
1/4 cup mustard seed
1/3 Tbsp celery seed

Peel and core tomatoes, chop coarsely in food processor, and partially drain mixture in a strainer. Chop peppers and onions in food processor to approximate size of pickle relish. Place all in stockpot with cinnamon and allspice and 1-1/2 cups of the vinegar. Bring to a boil and simmer vigorously, reducing liquid considerably, for 1 hour to 1-1/2 hours.

Remove cinnamon and allspice. Add remaining vinegar, sugar, salt, celery seed and mustard seed, as well as powdered cinnamon and allspice to taste. Simmer for 10 minutes. Pour into hot sterilized jars, allowing 1/2 inch headroom in jars. Boil in canner for 5 minutes.

Piccalilli Update:



So after a month and a half of mellowing in the jar, I tried the Piccalilli at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's house (I brought the country ham in a crust that I made some months back). Verdict: pretty close, but a little more red pepper taste than my grandmother would have put in it; I suspect she used especially flavorless 1960s/1970s green bell peppers. And frankly, even though I felt like I dumped in enough sugar to float Shirley Temple, maybe it could use a little more sugar to match hers perfectly. Still, it's both good, and 87% close to my memories, and every ham sandwich I've made with it has satisfied me immensely. Actually, it's probably becoming the way it should taste pretty quickly.

Hi,

I'm delighted in my wee contribution to revisiting your Grandmother's memory via a signature relish. Did the relish mellow from when we first canned it? I've canned some stuff I did not initially like. When I tried much later, I found it acceptable to liking it very much.

Can't wait to try Lilly's Piccalilli for myself!

Regards,

Oh yeah, it was sinus-clearing vinegary when we canned it, and is very pleasant now.

Thanks for all your canning expertise and assistance.