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Pyfer Pickles
Salt pickles down dry for ten days, soak in fresh water one day; pour off water, place in porcelain kettle, cover with water and vinegar, and add a tea-spoon pulverized alum (to each gallon); set over night on a stove which had fire in during the day; wash and put in a jar with cloves, allspice, pepper, horse-radish and onions or garlic; boil fresh vinegar and pour over all; in two weeks they will be ready for use. These pickles are always fresh and crisp, and are made with much less trouble than in the old-fashioned way by keeping in brine. - Mrs. E. M. R.
This is a dry-salt cure followed by a vinegar pack, and almost every number that would make it safe is missing. The notes below explain what the original assumes and where it fails by current standards.
- No salt quantity"Salt pickles down dry for ten days" gives no weight of salt per weight of cucumbers. A dry cure works only when the salt is high enough to control spoilage organisms throughout, and there is no way to reconstruct the author's intent from this text.
- Unknown final acidityThe cucumbers are covered with "water and vinegar" in unstated proportion, and 19th-century household vinegar varied in strength. Safe vinegar pickling depends on a known dilution of vinegar of known acidity; here neither is given, so the finished pH is unknowable.
- Deliberate warm holdingStanding the kettle overnight on a stove that had fire in it during the day holds the contents warm for hours, though the bath is a water-and-vinegar mix rather than plain water. Whatever the intent, residual stove heat is not a controlled or measurable process.
- No heat process, ambient storageThe jar is filled, covered with boiled vinegar, and left two weeks before eating. There is no sealing, no processing time, and no temperature given, so this is neither a canned product nor a refrigerated one.
- The alumA teaspoon of pulverized alum per gallon was a common Victorian crisping trick. Potassium alum is still a permitted food additive in small amounts, but it does nothing for safety and modern pickling relies on calcium chloride or simply trimming the blossom end instead.
- What the recipe never saysThe vegetable itself is unnamed, though "pickles" here almost certainly means cucumbers, and no jar size, yield, or quantity of spices is given. If you want crisp vinegar pickles, use a current tested recipe with measured salt, measured 5 percent vinegar and a stated process.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) collected contributions from Ohio households, which is why so many entries carry a family name or a set of initials rather than a title - "Pyfer Pickles" is likely somebody's household formula, passed along and printed as received. Its selling point is stated outright: it is less trouble than the old-fashioned way of keeping cucumbers in brine. Alum appears constantly in American pickle recipes of this period as the guarantor of crispness, and was generally believed to firm the cucumber's flesh; the practice persisted in home canning literature well into the 20th century before being dropped as unnecessary. Recipes like this one sit right at the transition from preserving by salt to preserving by vinegar, at a point when neither the strength of household vinegar nor the acidity a pickle needed was something a cook could measure.