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Pickled Cucumbers
Wash and wipe the cucumbers and place them in a jar. To one gallon of cider vinegar, add one teacupful of salt, one or two red peppers cut fine, one quarter of a pound of white mustard seed, one quarter of an ounce of ginger root, a piece of alum the size of a butternut, one teacup of horse radish root not grated, then bring the ingredients to a boil and pour over the cucumbers boiling hot, cover closely and they are done. I find from long experience this is the best way to pickle cucumbers.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle: nothing is cooked but the brine, which is poured boiling over raw cucumbers. The proportions are generous enough for a five-gallon stone crock, so scale down before you buy a gallon of vinegar.
- The hinge: full-strength vinegarThe safety and keeping quality of this pickle rest entirely on undiluted cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Do not cut it with water, and do not substitute a homemade or artisanal vinegar of unknown strength.
- Storage, which the original omits"Cover closely and they are done" presumably assumed a cool cellar. Without a boiling-water canning process there is no seal, so treat these as refrigerator pickles: cool the jars and keep them cold, and discard any batch that grows mould or goes cloudy and soft.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, smaller than a modern mug, though the measure was never standard. Three-quarters of a cup of salt to a gallon of vinegar is a light brine by pickling standards; use pickling or kosher salt, since iodised table salt can cloud the liquid.
- A piece of alum the size of a butternutA butternut is roughly walnut-sized, so a sizeable lump: a tablespoon or more of potassium alum rather than a spoonful. It was added for crispness and can simply be left out; trimming 1/16 inch from the blossom end of each cucumber does more, since that is where the softening enzymes sit.
- Ginger root and horseradishA quarter ounce of ginger root most likely means dried whole ('race') ginger, roughly a thumb-sized piece, rather than fresh. The horseradish goes in as ungrated chunks of root, as the recipe specifies.
- Choose the right cucumberThis wants small pickling cucumbers, 2 to 4 inches, picked the same day if possible. Waxed supermarket slicing cucumbers will not take the brine and will collapse.
- Yield and timingOne gallon of brine will cover roughly 8 to 10 pounds of small cucumbers, depending on how tightly they are packed. They are edible after a few days, but the mustard, ginger and pepper take a couple of weeks or more to come forward.
Pickling was one of the year's fixed household tasks in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and vinegar recipes like this one belonged to the late-summer glut when cucumbers came in faster than anyone could eat them. The measurement "a piece of alum the size of a butternut" suggests a region where the butternut, or white walnut, Juglans cinerea, was familiar: it grew wild through New England, the Appalachians and the Ohio Valley, and cooks did reach for familiar nuts and eggs as gauges long before graduated spoons were standard equipment. Alum was a common druggist's item and was widely credited with keeping pickles crisp, a practice American cookbooks gradually dropped. White mustard seed, red pepper and horseradish all did double duty as flavourings and as preservatives, and the author's closing claim of "long experience" is typical of recipe books built out of neighbourly exchange rather than professional instruction.