Talk:Chow-chow
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Chow-chow is within the scope of WikiProject Plants, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to plants and botany. For more information, visit the project page. | |
| Stub | This article has been rated as Stub-class on the quality scale. | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale. | |
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. | ||||||||
| Stub | This article has been rated as Stub-class on the quality scale. | ||||||||
| Mid | This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance scale. |
||||||||
|
|||||||||
We made a dish called "chow-chow" from an old recipe that came from the farm. It consists of two heads of cabbage, 24 green tomatoes (fresh from the garden), 4 green bell peppers, 4 red bell peppers, 8 onions and 8 carrots. All of these are ground up fine using an old fashioned grinder. We attached the grinder to the picnic table so that afterwards the crumbs could just be hosed off.
After all the vegetables are ground together, they are salted and spooned into a canvas bag. The bag is tied tightly at the neck with a string, then hung up to drain overnight. The next day we washed and sterilized many canning jars, while heating three pints of vinegar in a large pan, to which we added six cups of sugar and stirred until the sugar dissolved completely. Next the vegetables were added to the vinegar-sugar mixture, along with 1 teaspoon of mustard seeds and 1 teaspoon of dill seeds. The mixture is allowed to get hot, but not to boil. We filled 12 canning jars with the mixture and carefully placed the lids on - they had to be turned to just "fingertip" tightness, no more. The next day the jar lids can be tightened the rest of the way.
I guess this recipe comes from my grandmother who grew up on a farm down in southern Missouri. It's called "chow-chow," but I've heard some of the other folks also pronounce it "cha-cha."
L. Williams
[edit] Australian dish?
Never heard of an Australian dish dish called chow-chow, nor anything similar to the dish described. Does anyone have a reference for this?
- Chow-chow that one might find in Australia would more accurately be described as a northern Indian or Nepal based dish. I would assume it made its way to Australian menus through south Asian immigrants. It doesn't appear to be a widely known dish in Australia, though I found a few mentions as menu items in south Asian restaurants there. Perhaps an edit should be made if more information can be found and cited. Jacksinterweb 16:04, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Australian dish?
Never heard of it either...
[edit] Possible Chinese origin?
I founded the entry on "chow-chow" when trying to look up a similarly named Chinese dish mentioned in a 19th century book. Like the Pennsylvania relish, it has a wide mixture of ingredients that are cooked into a paste. It is possible that the two are related. Could the dish have originated in China and subsequently been borrowed and adapted by Americans? Unfortunately the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink has no entry for it at all.
Here is the reference I encountered, recorded in the memoirs of an Englishman traveling in Siam:
"There was an old Chinaman who had... erected in the centre of his canoe a cooking apparatus, and he ladled out into cups of very goodly dimensions a by no means contemptible-looking soup, commonly known in China as "Chou-chou," which consists of a mixture of every kind of meat and vegetables that the earth produces, boiled down into a kind of jelly and seasoned with pepper and salt..."
Frederick Arthur Neale, Narrative of a Residence in Siam, (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852), p.24.
Later in the text Neale gives a more detailed description of the dish:
"The first dish was a species of soup, called by the natives chou chou: it was a composition of pork, fowl, yams, sweet potatoes, ducks, fish, onions, garlic, mint, pepper, salt, and cloves; these were all boiled down to a perfect mash, and then more water and a small piece of bird's-nest were added, till the whole somewhat resembled in substance and colour, very rich turtle-soup."
Neale, p.142.
Juxian 08:21, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
