Sweet Pickles
Take ripe cucumbers, pare them, cut out the seeds, cut in strips, soak in brine twenty-four hours; then put them in vinegar and water, equal parts; after having done this put them in sweetened vinegar, the same as any sweet pickle, and cook until tender; one quart vinegar, three pounds coffee sugar, one tablespoon ground cinnamon, tie it up in a cloth, also a few whole cloves, and boil all together until clear and done; this receipt would require twelve ordinary sized ripe cucumbers.
A cooked sweet cucumber pickle of the kind meant for the supper table rather than the cellar shelf. The original assumes you know how to mix a brine and how strong your vinegar is; both need pinning down.
- "Ripe cucumbers" are not salad cucumbersIn this period a ripe cucumber meant one left on the vine until it turned yellow and the skin toughened, which is why the recipe has you pare it and scoop the seeds. Large, mature, seedy cucumbers work; slim supermarket slicers or English cucumbers will collapse.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-grained white or very lightly refined granulated sugar sold under that name in the period; accounts of how it got the name vary. Plain granulated sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight. Three pounds to a quart of vinegar is roughly 6 3/4 cups sugar to 4 cups vinegar, a heavy syrup by modern taste.
- The brine is unspecifiedThe receipt says only "brine" for the 24-hour soak. Nineteenth-century household brine for vegetables was generally strong enough to float an egg, but the original gives no quantity, so treat the strength as the cook's judgment. Rinse the strips well afterward or the finished pickle will be aggressively salty.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar then varied; modern bottled vinegar is typically around 5 percent acidity, which is what this needs. Do not dilute the sweetened vinegar beyond the equal-parts water soak the recipe already calls for.
- Spice bagTying the ground cinnamon in cloth is the point of that instruction: loose ground cinnamon clouds the syrup and never settles. Use a doubled square of muslin or a tea filter, and add the whole cloves to the same bag so they can be fished out.
- Cook until tender, not until softThe strips should turn translucent and yield to a fork while still holding their shape, generally 20 to 30 minutes at a gentle simmer depending on thickness. 'Boil all together until clear' may refer to the syrup clearing or to the cucumber turning translucent; either way it comes before the cucumber falls apart.
- StorageThe receipt gives no sealing or processing instruction at all. Treat it as a fresh-pack pickle: keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within a few weeks; for shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested canning process instead.
- YieldTwelve large ripe cucumbers, pared and seeded, will fill several pint jars; the exact number depends on the size of the cucumbers and how thick the strips are cut.
Sweet pickles built on a heavy sugar-and-vinegar syrup with cinnamon and clove were a fixture of American supper tables through the second half of the nineteenth century, when sugar had become cheap enough to use by the pound and cucumbers came in by the bushel in late summer. The two-stage treatment here — a long salt soak to draw water out of the flesh, then a soak in half-strength vinegar before the sweet syrup — appears in many household receipts of the era for firming up vegetables that would otherwise turn to mush in hot syrup. That the recipe calls for ripe rather than small green cucumbers fits the way kitchen gardens worked: the small, perfect ones went to the table fresh, and what had grown past its best on the vine was put up.