Home › Sweet Pickles › Pickled Cucumbers
Pickled Cucumbers
Prepare and quarter ripe cucumbers, take out seeds, clean, lay in brine that will float an egg nine days, stirring every day, take out and put in clear water one day, lay in alum-water (a lump of alum size of a medium hulled hickory-nut to a gallon of water) over night, make syrup of a pint good cider vinegar, pound brown sugar, two table-spoons each broken cinnamon bark, mace, and pepper grains; make syrup (three pints of sugar to a quart of vinegar) enough to cover the slices, lay them in, and cook till tender. -Mrs. M. L. France.
A nineteenth-century sweet pickle made from overgrown cucumbers, salt-cured for nine days before it ever meets vinegar. The instructions give two different syrups; the parenthetical ratio is the one to follow.
- The syrup contradictionThe recipe first lists a pint of vinegar, a pound of brown sugar and the spices, then immediately says to make syrup at three pints of sugar to a quart of vinegar and enough of it to cover. Treat the second as the working formula and scale it to your volume of cucumber; the first list is really telling you the spice load per pint of vinegar.
- Brine that floats an eggThat is a strong brine, variously reckoned at somewhere between 10 and 15 percent salt; because the weight of a cup of salt varies with grain size, test with an egg rather than trusting a fixed measure. Use pickling or kosher salt with no iodine or anti-caking agents, keep the cucumbers weighted under the surface, and skim any scum daily as you stir.
- The freshening day is not optionalAfter nine days in that brine the cucumbers are inedibly salty. The full day in clear water draws the salt back out; change the water two or three times over that day and taste a scrap before proceeding.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard firming agent and is still sold as a spice-rack item. A hulled hickory nut is roughly a 1/2-ounce lump, about a tablespoon of granules, per gallon. Modern practice generally skips it, since a cold soak and a gentle cook keep the pieces firm enough; too much alum leaves a puckering, metallic edge.
- "Ripe" cucumbersThis means mature, yellowing, thick-skinned cucumbers with developed seeds, not the small firm ones sold as picklers. The recipe says only to quarter them and take out the seeds; with tough skins it is usual to peel as well, and to scrape the seed cavity clean. Oversized garden cucumbers that got away from you are exactly right.
- Spices"Pepper grains" are whole black peppercorns. Mace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg, sold ground or as blades; blades are better here. Tie the whole spices in cheesecloth if you want a clear syrup rather than a speckled one.
- Cook till tenderBring the syrup to a boil, add the drained pieces, then drop to a bare simmer for 30 to 45 minutes until translucent and yielding to a knife tip. A hard boil collapses the flesh and drives off the vinegar's aroma.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing step at all. Pack into clean jars, cover with the hot syrup, cool and refrigerate, where the pickles will keep for weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested pickle recipe with its own measured vinegar strength and processing time.
- YieldThe recipe fixes no quantity of cucumber; make only as much syrup as covers what you have. Sweet pickles were served in small amounts alongside cold meat, not eaten by the bowl.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) includes sweet pickles among its recipes, and this is the classic long-cure version: salt first, then sugar and vinegar, a sequence often said to descend from the days when the salt crock helped hold a late-summer glut of cucumbers until there was time and fuel to spare for boiling syrup. Recipes of this type were often called "mangoes" in American cookbooks when the hollowed cucumber was stuffed, the name borrowed from the pickled Indian mangoes that reached England by ship. Alum appears here because firmness was the mark of a good pickle and lump alum was commonly sold for the purpose; the practice came to be questioned and largely disappeared from home canning advice in the twentieth century. Nearly every contribution in the book carries a name, as this one does, which is what the volume was: a subscription collection gathered from housekeepers rather than the work of a single author.