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Dill Pickles
Boil and skim three gallons of water, and two pounds of coarse salt. Select cucumbers from six to eight inches long. Wash and wipe them carefully, then put a layer of them in a big stone jar, - one that will hold at least four gallons.
Then put in a layer of grape leaves and a bunch of dill seed on the stalk. Proceed in this way till the jar is full, then lay on plenty of cabbage leaves. On the very top put a large stone.
Fill up with brine and let it stand. Quiet fermentation takes place. In about two or three weeks the cucumbers are done, and ought to be transparent, like amber, with a sub-acid flavor, which the grape leaves and stems give the cucumbers.
This is a true salt-brine ferment, not a vinegar pickle, and the whole thing hinges on keeping the cucumbers under the brine for the two or three weeks it takes. Anything that floats into the air will mold.
- The brine strengthTwo pounds of coarse salt to three gallons of water works out to roughly 7 to 8 percent salt by weight, which is at the strong end of the traditional fermenting range and is what allows an open crock to sit at room temperature. Use pickling or kosher salt with no iodine or anti-caking agents; the additives cloud the brine and can inhibit the fermentation.
- The crockA "big stone jar" is a glazed stoneware crock. A 4-gallon crock holds a great deal of cucumbers; a 1-gallon crock or a wide glass jar with a quarter of everything is a more realistic modern batch. Do not ferment in metal, and avoid old crocks of unknown glaze.
- The stone on topThe weight exists solely to hold the vegetables below the brine. A scrubbed river stone, a water-filled zip bag, or a purpose-made glass fermentation weight all do the job. Nothing should sit above the liquid line.
- Dill seed on the stalkThis means whole flowering dill heads, seed and stem together, not the dried seed sold in a spice jar. If only dried dill is available, seed holds up better in a long brine than dill weed, which tends to break down.
- Grape leaves and cabbage leavesGrape leaves supply tannin, which slows the enzymes that soften cucumbers and keeps them crisp; oak, horseradish or blackcurrant leaves do the same. The cabbage leaves on top are a follower, a barrier that catches scum and keeps the cucumbers down. The "sub-acid flavor" is lactic acid from the ferment, not the leaves.
- Temperature and timingTwo to three weeks assumes a cool larder, around 65 to 70F. A warm kitchen ferments in as little as a week and produces softer pickles; below about 60F it can take a month. The amber translucency the recipe describes means the brine has penetrated all the way to the center.
- CucumbersSix to eight inches is a large pickling cucumber, not the waxed slicing cucumber sold today, which will not take brine through its coating. Buy unwaxed pickling or Kirby cucumbers and trim the blossom end, which carries softening enzymes.
- Skim and watchA white film of kahm yeast is harmless and should be skimmed off; fuzzy blue, black or pink mold means the batch goes out. Once the pickles are done, move the crock or transfer the pickles and brine to jars in the refrigerator, where they hold for months and slowly grow more sour.
Salt-brine pickling is far older than vinegar pickling and needs nothing but cucumbers, salt, water and time, which is why it turns up in nearly every cuisine with a cold cellar. The dill version is often said to have reached American cookbooks through Central and Eastern European immigrants, and the barrel pickle of the New York delicatessen is the same process on a commercial scale. The grape-leaf trick in this recipe is genuine folk chemistry: tannin inhibits the pectin-degrading enzymes that turn a fermenting cucumber to mush, a mechanism that home canners may well have arrived at by result long before it was explained. Books like this one sit at the hinge between crock fermenting and the new sealed-jar canning, and a recipe like this one, with its stone weight and its three weeks of quiet bubbling, belongs to the older practice.