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Pickles Without Vinegar
In places where vinegar cannot be readily obtained, cucumbers and other articles for pickling may be made sour as follows: Take one quart of good alcohol to four quarts of water; put the cucumbers in fresh from the vines. Wipe them first with a wet cloth, or wash and drain them. Put in a warm place until fit for the table, then keep them in a cellar, or a cool place. They remain hard and green; and are always ready for the table.
This is a preservation method rather than a dish, and it is the one category of old recipe that cannot simply be updated. The points below explain what the instructions leave out and why that matters.
- No acid, and no way to measure itVinegar in a pickle is not only flavour: it drops the pH below 4.6, the line under which Clostridium botulinum cannot produce toxin. This recipe supplies no vinegar, no measured salt brine and no starter, so nothing in it guarantees an acidic finish. The souring is left to whatever organisms happen to be on the cucumbers.
- "Until fit for the table" in a warm placeWarm holding of a low-acid vegetable in liquid is the kind of condition that favours botulinum growth wherever air is excluded. The original gives no temperature, no duration and no test for readiness, so there is no point at which the batch can be judged safe.
- "Good alcohol" is not a defined ingredientThe word covered spirits of widely differing strength, from high-proof grain spirit to whatever a druggist happened to supply, and the recipe fixes none of it. One quart of a 95 percent spirit in five quarts total lands somewhere near 19 percent by volume; one quart of 40 percent whiskey lands near 8 percent. Neither figure is stated, and the lower one is not preservative.
- The green, hard cucumbers are not evidence of safetyThe recipe's selling point is that the cucumbers stay firm and bright. Botulinum toxin produces no reliable off-smell, no cloudiness and no softening, so appearance tells you nothing about whether a jar is dangerous.
- Cellar storage is not refrigerationA nineteenth-century cellar might sit anywhere from 45F to 65F depending on season. That range is not cold enough to be treated as a safety control for an unacidified pack.
- If you want picklesUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service, which will specify vinegar of known acidity, salt by weight and processing time. Do not attempt to repair this one by adding vinegar by eye.
Vinegar was a manufactured or at least a carefully husbanded good in the nineteenth-century household, made from cider, wine or malt and often bought by the barrel; recipes that begin "in places where vinegar cannot be readily obtained" are addressed to households where the nearest supply was a long haul away. Cookbooks of the era carry a family of substitution tricks of this kind, alongside pickles set down in brine alone. The confident promise that the cucumbers "remain hard and green" also reflects a period preoccupation with the appearance of pickles, an era in which some cooks greened them over copper, a practice condemned in period sources.