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TO CLARIFY MOLASSES
Heat over the fire and pour in one pint of sweet milk to each gallon of molasses. The impurities rise in scum to the top, which must be skimmed off before the boiling breaks it. Add the milk as soon as placed over the fire, mixing it thoroughly with the molasses. CUCUMBER RELISH may be made of the large cucumbers. Pare and cut in two, take out seeds, and grate, strain out most of the water, season highly with pepper and salt, add a little sugar, and as much vinegar as you have cucumbers; put in small bottle and seal.
Two unrelated fragments share this entry: a sugar-house technique for cleaning up raw molasses, and a raw cucumber relish sealed in bottles for storage. The first is obsolete but interesting; the second is the reason for the warning above.
- Why the relish failsGrated raw cucumber is bottled and sealed with no cooking, no processing, and no measured proportions of salt, sugar or acid. "As much vinegar as you have cucumbers" is a volume ratio that cannot be checked once the vegetable's own water has been squeezed out to an unspecified degree, so the finished acidity is unknown, and an unheated sealed jar of vegetable matter of unverified pH is not safe to keep. Use a current tested pickle or relish recipe.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk is meant; the fat is irrelevant here, but the casein and albumin are the working ingredients.
- How the clarifying worksThe milk proteins coagulate as the molasses heats and rise as a raft, carrying dirt, cane fibre and scum with them. It is the same principle as clarifying stock or jelly with egg white, and it is the reason the recipe wants the milk in at the start, as soon as the pan goes over the fire, and stirred through evenly.
- "Before the boiling breaks it"The scum has to come off while it still holds together. Once the syrup boils hard the raft breaks up and the trapped impurities can be carried back into the molasses, so skim steadily as the scum gathers rather than letting it reach a full rolling boil.
- ProportionsOne pint of milk to one gallon of molasses is roughly 1 part in 8 by volume — a gallon of molasses weighs about 11 to 12 lb. Scale down freely; the ratio, not the quantity, is what matters.
- Whether you need this at allSupermarket molasses is already filtered and clarified at the mill. This instruction was written for barrel molasses bought direct from a sorghum or cane boiler, which arrived cloudy and full of sediment. There is nothing for the milk to remove in a modern jar.
- Cucumber prep, for what it is worthThe paring, seeding, grating and pressing out of water in the second fragment is sound technique and still standard practice for cucumber relish — large, seedy, late-season cucumbers are mostly water, and undrained pulp dilutes everything. It is the sealing and storage that is unsafe, not the handling.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877, out of Marysville and Minneapolis) was compiled from the contributions of Midwestern housekeepers at a period when molasses and sorghum syrup, rather than white sugar, are generally thought to have done much of the sweetening in rural baking. Sorghum boiling was a neighbourhood autumn event across Ohio and Indiana, and the syrup that came home in a jug or barrel carried whatever the evaporating pans had picked up, which is why a household needed a way to clean it. Clarifying with milk belongs to a family of protein-raft techniques used all over the nineteenth-century kitchen and sugar house — egg white for jellies and coffee, milk or blood for syrups, isinglass for cider and wine — all working on the same principle that a coagulating protein will collect suspended matter and float it. The "Fragments" section here seems to serve as a catch-all, which may be how a clarifying instruction and a cucumber relish came to share a paragraph with no transition between them.