A simple combo of mustard, sweet gherkins, and pickled vegetables, this dresses a dog like it's going to a debutante ball. We also like the relish with other grilled sandwiches, particularly chicken and turkey.
MAKES ABOUT 1½ CUPS
| 1½ | 16-ounce jar mixed pickled vegetables (carrots, cauliflower, celery, and onions are good) such as Italian giardiniera, drained, rinsed, and drained again |
| 10-ounce jar sweet gherkin pickles, drained and 3 tablespoons of syrup reserved | |
| ½ | cup yellow ballpark mustard |
| 1 | tablespoon sugar |
Chop the vegetables and the pickles into small bite-size pieces, but avoid mincing them as in a commercial relish to maintain texture. Place the vegetables and pickles in a medium bowl and stir in the reserved syrup, mustard, and sugar. The relish keeps indefinitely covered and refrigerated.
Americans didn't need a lot of encouragement to jump into outdoor grilling in the 1940s and '50s, but they did seek inspiration on how to do it well. Many professional cooks, home economists, and food writers volunteered help—through cookbooks, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines—but the advice was often more ephemeral than enduring.
Among the pioneers who truly added to our knowledge, a handful stand out as genuine masters. The first on the scene were an almost forgotten trio of great home cooks, Cora, Rose, and Bob Brown. They wrote numerous magazine articles and books, but their 1940 Outdoor Cooking (Greystone Press) remains a classic on the subject. Sophisticated in their understanding of food and seasoning, but down-home in their love of eating, the Browns ranged in their recipes from Bordeaux Brandied Crawfish to this simple steak sauce: "Dump plenty chili sauce out of the bottle into the frying pan and heat it up on a good bed of embers and ashes with the juice of a whole lemon, a lump of butter about the size of your pipe bowl and a few shakes of zigzag Tabasco lightning."
Far better known than the Browns, in his day and today, James Beard took an outdoor approach to becoming the contemporary virtuoso of American cooking. His second cookbook—after one on happy-hour hors d'oeuvres—introduced a lifelong call to Cook It Outdoors (M. Barrows and Company, 1941). Perhaps more than anyone before or since, he appreciated the place of outdoor cooking and flavors in the mainstream of American cuisine. Beard's field of vision ultimately encompassed much more than grilling and barbecuing, but he returned to those topics in his cookbooks far more than any others and wrote about them with unsurpassed passion.
One of his finest works, The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery (Doubleday, 1955), was co-authored by another great grilling pioneer, Helen Evans Brown. A talented cook who celebrated the joy of patio and backyard dining, she brought a sunny California perspective to the collaboration with Beard and to several books of her own. Brown talked about deferring to men when it came to outdoor cooking, but in fact she had a major influence on the main man himself and a whole generation of male grillers.