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Sweet Ripe Pickles
Take sound, ripe cucumbers, peel and remove the seeds, cut lengthwise into strips an inch wide. To three quarts of the pieces add three cups of vinegar and four of water; soak twenty-four hours, stirring once or twice. Put one quart of vinegar on the fire, add one pint of sugar, a little stick cinnamon and a teaspoonful of pimento tied in a bit of cloth; scald all together. add the cucumber and boil till soft.
A fresh-pack sweet pickle from the era when cucumbers were left on the vine until they turned yellow. The opening line is a stray illustration caption for the pickling kettle, not an instruction.
- "Ripe" cucumbersThis means fully mature, yellowed cucumbers with tough skin and developed seeds — the reason the recipe tells you to peel and seed them. Ordinary supermarket slicing cucumbers work, but choose the largest and firmest you can find; small pickling Kirbys are the wrong thing here and will collapse.
- QuantityThree quarts of prepared strips means somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 lb of whole cucumber before peeling and seeding. Yield is a few pints, depending on how much the strips shrink in the syrup.
- PimentoIn recipes of this period pimento normally means allspice berries, not sweet red pepper. A teaspoonful whole, tied in cloth with the cinnamon stick, is right; ground allspice will cloud the syrup.
- The soakTwenty-four hours in diluted vinegar with no salt is unusual; many sweet pickle recipes of the period brine in salt to draw out water first. Keep it refrigerated for the full day, not on the counter.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5% cider or white vinegar. Household vinegar of the period varied in strength, and homemade vinegar could be weaker.
- "Boil till soft"Twenty to thirty minutes of gentle simmering, until the strips turn translucent at the edges and a skewer passes through with no resistance. Hard boiling breaks the pieces apart; keep it just at a simmer and stir rarely.
- Syrup balanceOne pint of sugar to one quart of vinegar is tart by modern taste. If you want the sweeter modern profile, taste the scalded syrup before the cucumbers go in and add sugar then rather than at the end.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing directions, so treat this as a refrigerator pickle: pack hot into clean jars, cover with the syrup, cool, and keep chilled. Use within a month. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure.
Sweet pickles made from peeled, seeded, overripe cucumbers were a standard use for the end of the vine crop, when the fruit had gone yellow and coarse and was no longer fit for slicing or for small brined pickles. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks are full of such recipes under names like ripe cucumber pickle, sweet ripe pickles and cucumber mangoes, all built on the same logic: cut away skin and seeds, tame the watery flesh with a soak, then cook it in a spiced sweet-sour syrup of vinegar, sugar, cinnamon and allspice. The stray line about the lipped preserving and pickling kettle is a reminder of the period's equipment sales pitch — a kettle with a pouring lip was advertised as essential for putting up fruit and pickles.