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Pickled Onions
Select small silver-skinned onions, remove with a knife all the outer-skins, so that each onion will be perfectly white and clean. Put them into brine that will float an egg for three days, drain, place in jar, first a layer of onions three inches deep, then a sprinkling of horse-radish, cinnamon bark, cloves, and a little cayenne pepper; repeat until jar is filled, in proportion of half a tea-spoon cayenne pepper, two tea-spoons each chopped horse-radish and cloves, and four table-spoons cinnamon bark, to a gallon of pickles; bring vinegar to boiling point; add brown sugar in the proportion of a quart to a gallon, and pour hot over the onions. - Estelle Woods Wilcox.
A straightforward vinegar pickle, but the original assumes a stoneware crock in a cold cellar and vinegar of unstated strength. A few translations make it workable.
- Brine that will float an eggThis is the old test for a strong salt solution; an egg becomes buoyant at roughly 10 percent salt by weight, so figure in the region of half a pound of salt to a gallon-plus of water rather than anything near saturation. Use pickling or kosher salt; the additives in iodized table salt tend to cloud the brine.
- Three days in brineThe salt cure draws water out of the onions so they stay crisp and so the vinegar is not diluted. Do not skip it, and do rinse the onions after draining or the finished pickle will be aggressively salty.
- Silver-skinned onionsThese are the small white pickling or boiling onions, generally sold today as pearl onions. Blanch 30 seconds and shock in cold water to make the skins slip; the recipe's knife-peeling of raw onions is slow work.
- Vinegar strengthUse commercial vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it. Cider or white wine vinegar suits the spices better than distilled white, which is harsher.
- Cinnamon barkFour tablespoons per gallon means broken pieces of stick cinnamon, not ground. Ground spices will cloud the jar and settle into sludge; tie the bark and cloves in cheesecloth if you want a clear brine.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleThe recipe pours hot vinegar over raw onions in an open jar and stops there. There is no boiling-water processing, so the jars are not shelf-stable by modern standards. Cool, cap, and refrigerate; follow a current tested recipe if you want them canned for the pantry.
- SugarA quart of brown sugar to a gallon of vinegar is a sweet-sour pickle, closer to a British-style sweet onion than a sharp cocktail onion. Reduce it if you want the vinegar forward.
- WaitingGive them three to four weeks before eating. Straight from the jar the vinegar is raw and the spices have not moved into the onions. A gallon of pickles is a great deal; the spice proportions scale down cleanly.
Small pickled onions were a fixture of the nineteenth-century American relish tray, set out alongside chow-chow, piccalilli and spiced fruit as part of the assortment of sharp, sweet things meant to cut rich boiled and roasted meats. Estelle Woods Wilcox compiled and edited Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), gathering contributions from Ohio housewives, and her own name appears on the pickle receipt. The pickle chapter in a book like this one is long for a reason: before home refrigeration, a well-salted, well-vinegared crock was one of the few ways to carry the garden's produce through to spring, and a family put up pickles by the gallon rather than the pint. The mixture of cinnamon bark, cloves, cayenne and horseradish is characteristic of the period, when spice combinations for pickling were still assembled by the cook rather than bought as a packaged blend.