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Sweet Pickles (May be made of any fruit)
Sweet pickles may be made of any fruit that can be preserved, including the rinds of ripe melons and cucumbers. The proportion of sugar to vinegar for syrup is three pints to a quart. Sweet pickles may be made of any preserve by boiling over the syrup and adding spices and vinegar. Examine frequently, and re-scald the syrup if there are signs of fermentation. Plums and other smoothskinned fruits should be well pricked before cooking. The principal spices for sweet pickles are cinnamon and cloves. Use "coffee C," best brown, or good stirred maple sugar.
This is a master formula rather than a single recipe, and the part it leaves out is the part that keeps preserved fruit safe. The syrup ratio is sound; the preservation method is not.
- No processing step at allThe entry gives no jar, sealing or processing instruction of any kind; on the usual assumption that fruit and syrup were put up hot, this is the open-kettle method, abandoned in home preserving because a sealed jar that was never heat-processed in a canner cannot be assumed sterile. Current tested sweet-pickle recipes call for a measured boiling-water bath, and one of those should be used instead.
- "Re-scald the syrup if there are signs of fermentation"This is the line that rules the recipe out. Visible fermentation, bubbling or a lifted lid means the contents have already spoiled and been colonised; reboiling the syrup drives off the gas without removing what caused it. Spoiled preserves are discarded, not rescued.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar, often home-made cider vinegar, varied in acetic acid content and could fall below the 5 percent that modern pickling assumes. Fruit is watery and low in acid itself, so the finished syrup's pH here is genuinely unknown.
- "Any fruit that can be preserved"The blanket instruction sweeps in low-acid items — melon rind and cucumber especially — whose safety depends entirely on the vinegar doing its work. Applied to figs, melon or ripe cucumber with weak vinegar, there is no acid margin left.
- "Any preserve" reboiled with vinegarTaking an already-made preserve, boiling it up with spices and vinegar and sealing it compounds the problem: unknown starting microbial load, no measured process.
- On "coffee C" sugar, for the recordC sugar was a soft, faintly moist brown grade sold by the barrel and graded A, B, C by colour and refinement; "coffee C" was a mid-brown grade used for everyday sweetening. Light brown sugar is its nearest descendant. The syrup ratio itself — three pints sugar to a quart of vinegar — is close to what tested modern sweet-pickle recipes still use.
Sweet pickles sit at the seam between preserving and pickling, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks treated them almost as a subgenre of jam: fruit cooked down in sugar with enough vinegar and whole spice to make it a relish for meat rather than a spread for bread. Cinnamon and clove, named here as the principal spices, were among the more commonly stocked imported spices in a kitchen of the period. The instruction to use melon and cucumber rind reflects a household economy in which the sweet flesh of a watermelon was eaten fresh and the thick white rind, otherwise waste, was turned into winter store. Buckeye Cookery assumes a reader who already knows how to preserve fruit and needs only the ratio and the variations, which is why this entry reads as a set of rules rather than a recipe — and why it says nothing about processing times.