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Cucumber Pickles
Cover the bottom of cask with common salt; gather the cucumbers every other day, early in the morning or late in the evening, as it does not injure the vines so much then as in the heat of the day; cut the cucumbers with a short piece of the stem on, carefully izying them in a basket or pail so as not to bruise; pour cold water over and rinse, being careful not to rub off the little black briers, or in any way to bruise them, as that is the secret of keeping them perfectly sound and good for any length of time. Lay them in a cask three or four inches deep, cover with salt, and repeat the operation until all are in; pour in some water with the first layerafter this the salt will make sufficient brine. Now spread a cloth over them, then a board with a stone on it. When a new supply of cucumbers is to be added, remove stone, board and cloth, wash them very clean, and wipe every particle of scum from the top of the pickles and the sides of the cask; throw away any soft ones, as they will spoil the rest; now put in the fresh cucumbers, layer by layer, with salt to cover each layer. When cask is nearly full, cover with salt, tuck cloth closely around the edges, placing the board and weight on top; cover cask closely, and the pickles will be perfect for two or three years. Cucumbers must always be put in the salt as soon as picked from the vines, for if they lie a day or two they will not keep. Do not be alarmed at the heavy scum that rises on them, but be careful to wash all off the board and cloth. When wanted for pickling, take off weight and board, carefully lift cloth with scum on it, wash stone, board and cloth clean, and wipe all scum off the cucumbers and sides of cask, take out as many as are wanted, return the cloth, board and weight, and cover closely. Place the cucumbers in a vessel large enough to hold two or three times as much water as there are pickles, cover with cold water (some use hot), change the water each day for three days, place the porcelain kettle on the fire, fill half full of vinegar (if vinegar is very strong add half water), fill nearly full of cucumbers, the largest first and then the smaller ones, put in a lump of alum the size of a nutmeg, let come to a boil, stirring with a wire or wooden spoon so as not to cut the cucumbers; after boiling one minute, take out, place in a stone jar, and continue until all are scalded, then pour over them cold vinegar. In two or three days, if the pickles are too salt, turn off the vinegar and put on fresh, add a pint of brown sugar to each two gallons pickles, a pod or two of red pepper, a very few cloves, and some pieces of horseradish. The horse-radish prevents a white scum from rising.
This is salt-stock pickling: cucumbers held for months or years in a dry-salt cure, then desalted and finished in vinegar. The method is genuine and was once universal, but as written it gives no salt weight, no brine strength and no way to check either, and the finished pickles are not sealed. Read it as a record of practice and use a current tested brining recipe if you want to make pickles.
- The cure is unmeasuredEverything depends on the cucumbers sitting in a fully saturated brine, which here is produced by guesswork — salt scattered "to cover each layer" plus whatever water the vegetables give up. Modern brining recipes specify salt as a percentage of the water weight precisely because a weak or diluted brine allows soft rot and spoilage organisms to take hold, and there is nothing in this text to measure against.
- Years in an open crockThe cask is covered with a cloth, board and weight, not sealed, and the recipe expects a "heavy scum" — a yeast and mold film — for two or three years. That film consumes acid and can raise the pH of the brine, which is exactly the condition a controlled ferment is designed to prevent. Repeatedly opening the cask to add fresh cucumbers reintroduces contamination each time.
- AlumThe "lump of alum the size of a nutmeg" is potassium aluminium sulphate, added as a firming agent. It is no longer recommended for pickles: it contributes little crispness against a good brine, and an unweighed lump of it is not a quantity anyone should be eating.
- The finish is not preservationA one-minute boil in vinegar, then cold vinegar poured over pickles in a stone jar, is a flavouring and holding step, not a heat process. Nothing here brings the packed jars to a temperature that would make them shelf-stable, and the later step of pouring off the vinegar and replacing it breaks whatever acidity had been established.
- Terms in the textA "cask" is a wooden barrel; a "stone jar" is glazed stoneware. "Porcelain kettle" means an enamelled pan, specified because vinegar attacks bare iron and copper. "Little black briers" are the prickles on a freshly picked cucumber. "Izying" is a typesetter's mangling, probably of "laying".
- What was sound adviceTwo details still hold: pick cucumbers the same day they go into the cure, and discard any that have gone soft, since soft-rot enzymes will spread through a whole batch. The instruction to handle them without bruising is also correct — damaged skin is where spoilage starts.
Salt-stock pickling was the backbone of the nineteenth-century kitchen garden. Cucumbers ripen over weeks, in quantities too small to pickle properly on any one day, so they were thrown into a salt cask as they came and drawn out in winter, desalted, and finished in spiced vinegar — the same logic behind salt pork and salt cod. Buckeye Cookery, first published in Ohio in 1876, grew out of recipes gathered for a Marysville church fundraiser and was compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox; it is aimed squarely at that kind of household, assuming a cellar, a barrel, a weighted board and a cook who checks the crock every few days. Alum was common in American pickle recipes of the period and appears in commercial and domestic formulas well into the twentieth century before extension services began discouraging it. The horseradish, credited here with keeping the scum down, was a widely repeated piece of pickling lore; the effect claimed for it is not established.