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Pickled Raisins
Leave two pounds raisins on stem, add one pint vinegar and half pound sugar; simmer over a slow fire half an hour.-Mrs.
A three-ingredient sweet pickle that reads as terse even by Buckeye Cookery standards. Most of what a modern cook needs to know concerns the raisins themselves and how to keep the finished jar.
- Raisins on the stemNineteenth-century groceries sold muscatel and Malaga raisins still attached to their clusters, and this recipe calls for them left that way. Cluster raisins still turn up around the winter holidays; loose raisins work but give you a spoonable relish rather than anything that can be served in sprigs.
- Vinegar strengthThe recipe does not say what vinegar to use, and household vinegar of the period varied in acidity. Standard bottled cider vinegar at 5 percent may be sharper, so taste after simmering and add a spoonful more sugar if it bites.
- "A slow fire"This means the coolest part of the range top: a bare simmer, with the surface barely moving rather than a hard boil, which over half an hour would drive off much of the pint of vinegar.
- Half an hour is right hereHalf an hour -- The half hour gives the raisins time to swell and take up the vinegar.
- Not a canning recipeThere is no processing step, no sterilised jars, no headspace. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle: pack hot into a clean jar, cover with its liquid, cool, and keep chilled. It will hold for several weeks on acid and sugar alone.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of raisins plus a pint of vinegar makes appreciably more than a quart. Sweet pickles of this kind were commonly served in small dishes alongside cold meats.
Sweet pickles occupy a long run of pages in Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), and they answer a specific need of the period: a table of heavy roasted and boiled meats wanted something sharp and sweet alongside, and the pantry had to supply it from fruit that kept. Raisins were among the few fruits an Ohio household could count on year-round, arriving dried and often still clustered on the stem from Spain, and pickling them in vinegar and sugar turned an imported sweet into a condiment. The technique belongs to a family of British and American "sweetmeat" pickles \, damsons and the like, that are generally traced back to earlier English recipes for fruit preserved in spiced vinegar. The abrupt attribution, "-Mrs." with the surname lost, is characteristic of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named housewives across Ohio and whose contributor credits are simply inconsistent.