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Olive Oil Pickles
100 small cucumbers. 1 quart small onions. 1 pint olive oil. 1 ounce celery seed. 1/4 pound ground mustard. 1/4 pound white mustard seed. 2 quarts vinegar + pound ground mustard pound white mustard seed 1 tablespoonful black pepper Cut the cucumbers and onions in slices. Put into an earthen dish in layers with salt between.
Put a heavy weight above and let stand over night. Drain off the liquid. Mix the seasonings with the oil, then gradually stir in the vinegar; pour all over the pickles, mix well and store in cans, sealed as in canning.
This is a raw-pack oil-and-vinegar cucumber pickle of a type common in early twentieth-century preserving books. As printed here it cannot be followed safely, and the ingredient list has come through the page incomplete.
- The ingredient list is brokenThe ground mustard quantity begins with a stray character where a fraction should be, and the white mustard seed is given no quantity at all. The cucumbers and onions, and the olive oil the recipe is named for, appear only in the method and never in the list. There is no way to reconstruct the intended proportions from what survives.
- No heat is ever appliedThe cucumbers are salted overnight, drained, dressed and sealed cold. Nothing in the method brings the jars or their contents to any temperature at all, so there is no step that would destroy spoilage organisms or drive air out of the jars.
- Oil in a sealed jarA layer of oil over vegetables in a sealed container creates exactly the oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. This is the same reason current guidance treats home-bottled garlic-in-oil and herb-in-oil preparations as high risk. Modern tested pickle recipes do not seal oil into unprocessed jars.
- Acidity is unmeasuredTwo quarts of vinegar sounds like plenty, but with the weight of cucumbers and onions unstated and an unknown volume of oil in the mix, the finished acidity of the pack is unknowable. Safe pickling depends on a controlled ratio, not on the impression that there is a lot of vinegar.
- "Sealed as in canning" means nothing specificThe phrase covered a range of period practices, from wax seals to rubber-ringed lightning jars, and here it gives no time, no temperature and no headspace, which is precisely the gap that modern canning instructions exist to close.
- The salting stepThe overnight salt-and-weight draw is genuine technique and still used — it firms cucumber slices and pulls out water that would otherwise dilute the brine. But the recipe gives no salt quantity, so it functions as a texture step here, not as a preservative one.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe for mustard or bread-and-butter pickles from a reputable preserving authority, which will specify vinegar strength, salt, jar size and processing time.
Olive oil pickles, sometimes printed as "oil pickles," were a fixture in American preserving manuals. The dressing is essentially a cold mustard pickle: ground mustard and white mustard seed carry both flavour and a mild preservative effect, black pepper adds bite, and the oil softens the vinegar's edge. Recipes of this kind come from a tradition in which the household preserver worked from proportion and judgement rather than tested processing schedules rom from gengenuinely useful salting technique to an instruction as vague as "sealed as in canning" within a single paragraph.