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Sweet Pickles (Their season but they can be)
in their season, but they can be prepared very nicely at any time, by taking pear, peach, plum, or apple preserves, and pouring hot spiced vinegar over them; in a few days they will make a delightful relish. It very often happens in putting up cucumber pickles that you can only gather or buy a few at a time; these can be easily pickled in the following manner: Place in a jar, sprinkle with salt, in the proportion of a pint salt to a peck cucumbers, cover with boiling water, let stand twenty-four hours, drain, cover with fresh hot water; after another twenty-four hours, drain, place in a jar, and cover with cold, not very strong vinegar; continue to treat each mess in this manner, using the two jars, one for scalding and the other as a final receptacle for the pickles, until you have enough, when drain and cover with boiling cider vinegar, add spices, and in a few days they will be ready for use. Never throw away even
A fragment from the pickle chapter, running two ideas together: an instant sweet pickle made from leftover preserves, and a running crock method for putting up cucumbers a handful at a time. The method belongs to a kitchen with a cool cellar and homemade vinegar of unknown strength, and it does not translate.
- Why this one failsThe cucumbers are held at room temperature in salt brine for two days, then covered with "cold, not very strong vinegar" and left to accumulate over days or weeks before a final hot vinegar pour. Nothing in the sequence establishes an acidity, and diluted vinegar in a jar at ambient temperature will not reliably hold a pickle safe. Use a current tested pickling recipe with a stated vinegar strength and brine ratio.
- Vinegar was not standardisedHome-made cider vinegar of the period was of unknown and variable strength, well below the 5 percent that is the modern floor for shelf-stable pickling. The recipe's call for vinegar that is "not very strong" runs against current practice, where dilution is done only by a measured formula.
- Salt is not a preservative hereA pint of salt to a peck of cucumbers is a light, short brine meant to firm and draw water, not to cure. It gives no lasting protection once the cucumbers move to the vinegar jar.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of cucumbers. A pint of salt is about a pound, depending on the grain.
- "Each mess"A mess is simply a batch or a picking, whatever the garden yielded that day. The scheme uses two vessels: one for the scald-and-brine stage, one as the holding jar.
- The preserves trickThe opening idea, hot spiced vinegar poured over already-made pear, peach, plum or apple preserves, is the sound part of the fragment. It is a sweet pickle by conversion rather than by preservation; the text says only that the relish is ready in a few days, and says nothing about keeping it.
- A fragmentThe text begins mid-sentence, continuing a line about pickles being best in season, and it breaks off at "Never throw away even" — possibly the start of a note on saving leftover spiced vinegar, though the page does not say.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of Ohio church-society collections and reflects a household economy in which the garden delivered unevenly and nothing was allowed to go to waste. The running-crock method here exists for one reason: cucumbers ripen a few at a time, and a family without a market stall had to accumulate a winter's worth over weeks. The same thrift drives the opening suggestion, turning a jar of last year's peach preserves into a fresh relish with hot spiced vinegar. Sweet pickles of this kind — fruit, sugar, cider vinegar, cinnamon and cloves — were a fixture of the nineteenth-century American table, served alongside roast meat to cut its richness.