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Pickling Cucumbers
The nicest way is to slice them as you would for a salad, seasoning them just the same, with salt, pepper and vinegar, and sugar if you wish; put them in air tight cans, filling them up to the cover of the jar, which screw on very tight and put away. They will keep perfectly and you will have fresh cucumbers when the frost has wilted the vines and faded the greenness from all visible things.
This is a raw-pack preserve with no heat processing, no measured acid and no stated storage temperature. It is a period example of the kind of unsealed, unsterilised canning that food science spent the twentieth century learning to avoid.
- No measured acidThe vinegar is added "as you would for a salad" — a splash, to taste. Safe pickling depends on bringing the whole contents of the jar to pH 4.6 or below, which requires a known volume of vinegar of known strength (5 percent acetic acid) against a known weight of cucumber. Seasoning by taste cannot establish that.
- No heat at any stageNothing here is boiled, simmered or processed. The jars are filled cold, screwed shut and set aside. Neither the cucumbers nor the jars nor the lids are ever brought to a temperature that would destroy spoilage organisms or spores.
- The specific hazardA sealed, airtight, unacidified, unheated jar held at room temperature is close to ideal conditions for Clostridium botulinum: no oxygen, low acid, moderate warmth. Cucumbers are a low-acid vegetable and are grown in soil where the spores are common. Botulinum toxin produces no smell, no gas and no visible change in many cases.
- "Filling them up to the cover"Modern canning leaves deliberate headspace so that a vacuum can form as the jar cools. Here nothing is heated, so no vacuum seal forms however the jar is filled; the tight screw band is doing the work the process should do.
- Sugar and salt are not preservatives hereThe quantities implied are seasoning quantities. Salt preserves at brine strengths measured in percentages of the total weight; sugar preserves at jam concentrations. Neither is present at anything near a preserving level.
- If you want cucumbers in winterUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service, which will specify vinegar strength, brine ratio, jar size, headspace and processing time. Quick refrigerator pickles are the closest modern equivalent to what this writer wanted, and they are kept cold and eaten within weeks.
Sealed glass jars were a comparatively recent arrival in the ordinary American kitchen — the screw-top fruit jar had spread widely after the 1850s and by the end of the century was cheap enough that households put up everything they could reach. The result was a period of enormous enthusiasm and, by later standards, very little method: recipes of the sort often instruct the reader simply to fill the jar, screw the cover tight and "put away," on the reasonable-sounding but mistaken assumption that an airtight container is by itself a sterile one. Systematic processing times and acidity guidelines came later, out of agricultural station and extension work in the early twentieth century. The closing sentence explains the appeal better than any argument about method could: before refrigerated transport, a jar of green cucumber in December was worth real trouble.