Home › Pickles › Bottled Pickles
Bottled Pickles
Wash and wipe a half bushel of medium-sized cucumbers, suitable for pickling, pack close in a stone jar, sprinkle over the top one pint of salt, pour over a sufficient quantity of boiling water to cover them, place a cloth over the jar, and let stand until cold (if prepared in the evening, let stand all night), drain off the water, and place the pickles on stove in cold vinegar, let them come to a boil, take out, place in a stone jar, and cover with either cold or hot vinegar. They will be ready for use in a few days, and are excellent. It is an improvement to add a few spices and a small quantity of sugar.
To bottle them, prepare with salt and boiling water as above, drain (when cold), and place a gallon at a time on a stove in enough cold vinegar to cover level (need not be very strong), to which a lump of alum about the size of a small hickory-nut (too much is îujurious) has been added. Have on stove, in another kettle, a gallon of the very best cider vinegar, to which add half a pint of brown sugar; have bottles cleansed and placed to heat on stove in a large tin-pan of cold water; also have a tin cup or small pan of sealing-wax heated; on table, have spices prepared in separate dishes, as follows: Green and red peppers sliced in rings; horseradish roots washed, scraped, and cut in small pieces, black and yellow mustard seed (or this may be left out), each prepared by sprinkling with salt and pouring on some boiling water, which let stand fifteen minutes and then draw off; stick cinnamon washed free from dust, and broken in pieces, and a few cloves. When pickles come to boiling point, take out and pack in bottles, mixing with them the spices (use the cloves, horse-radish and mustard seed, sparingly); put in a layer of pickles, then a layer of spices, shaking the bottles occasionally so as to pack tightly; when full cover with the boiling hot vinegar from the other kettle (using a bright funnel and bright tin cup), going over them a second time and filling up, in order to supply shrinkage, for the pickles must be entirely covered with the vinegar. Put in the corks, which should fit very snugly, lift each bottle (wrap a towel around it to prevent burning the hands), and dip the corked end into the hot sealing-wax; proceed in this manner with each bottle, dipping each a second time into the wax so that they may be perfectly secure. If corks seem too small, throw them in boiling water; if too large, pound the sides with a hammer. The tighter they fit in the bottles the better for the pickles. Glass cans, the tops or covers of which have become defective, can be used by supplying them with corks. Pickles thus bottled are far more wholesome than, and are really superior to, the best brand of imported pickles, and, by having materials in readiness, prepared as directed, the process is neither difficult nor tedious. It requires two persons to successfully bottle pickles. Mrs. Florence W. Hush, Minneapolis.
This is a shelf-storage canning method from a period before anyone measured acidity or processed jars for a set time at a set temperature. The reading below explains the units and the reasoning, but the preservation scheme itself has been superseded.
- Why it fails as writtenThe pickles are packed hot, covered with hot vinegar, corked and dipped in wax — there is no water-bath processing and no way to know the seal held. A wax-dipped cork is not a hermetic closure; it can weep and admit air and mold as the jar cools and contracts. Use a current tested pickle recipe with a two-piece lid and a timed boiling-water bath.
- Unmeasured acidityThe instruction that the vinegar "need not be very strong" is the central problem. Safe vinegar pickling depends on a known 5 percent acetic acid vinegar and a known dilution; nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely, and the pre-boil in weak vinegar plus the drained salt water further dilutes what ends up in the bottle.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard crisping agent of the era, and the writer's parenthetical warning that too much is injurious is accurate — it is astringent and irritating in quantity. "A lump about the size of a small hickory-nut" is not a measurement anyone can reproduce. Modern practice drops alum entirely and relies on fresh cucumbers, trimmed blossom ends, and calcium chloride if crispness is wanted.
- Half a bushelRoughly 24 to 25 lb of pickling cucumbers, which is why the recipe assumes a large stone crock; separately, it states plainly that bottling takes two people. The pint of salt is by volume, roughly a pound of coarse salt, and functions as a brief overnight brine rather than a fermentation.
- Stone jarA glazed earthenware crock, used here only for the salting and holding stages. It is not a sealed vessel, and the first method described -- boil in vinegar, pack, cover with cold or hot vinegar -- is offered as something 'ready for use in a few days' rather than as a sealed preserve.
- Black and yellow mustard seedYellow (white) mustard seed is the mild one sold today as "yellow mustard seed"; black mustard seed is now largely replaced in commerce by brown. The salt-and-boiling-water soak is applied to the mustard seed, presumably to scald and soften it before packing.
- Sealing-waxProbably a rosin-based bottling compound (with beeswax or tallow), kept molten in a tin cup. It has no modern equivalent in home canning and fell out of domestic use as screw-band and clamped glass jars became cheap and reliable -- the recipe itself already assumes such cans, reusing defective ones with corks.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was built from contributions sent in by named women across the Midwest, and Mrs. Hush's closing boast is the point of the entry: her bottled cucumbers are "far more wholesome than, and are really superior to, the best brand of imported pickles." Imported pickles carried a reputation, part of a long-running concern about adulteration, for being greened with copper salts and firmed with excessive alum. A recipe like this one is a claim of domestic independence: the American housewife with a crock, a half bushel of cucumbers, cider vinegar and a pot of sealing wax could match the imported jar and know what was in it. The elaborate stage management — spices in separate dishes, bottles heating in a pan of water, wax melting, two people working at once — reflects the real constraint that everything had to be assembled and filled while boiling hot, on a wood or coal range, before the glass could cool.