Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Preserving › One Quart Dill Pickles
One Quart Dill Pickles
Fill a quart jar with pickles about the size of a finger; between the pickles put a piece of dill, or more if desired. When the jar is filled, add a level tablespoonful of salt. Pour in cold water; put dill on top of pickles, and seal airtight as for canned fruit. Place the jars in the sun each day until the water gets cloudy; when the water gets clear again, the pickles are ready for use. A few whole peppers may be added; a very little piece of bay-leaf may also be added, if the taste is liked. Just a small piece of fresh red pepper may be added also.
These pickles will keep for a year in a cool, dry place. If a two-quart jar is used, two level tablespoonfuls of salt are required.
This is a wild-fermented salt pickle of the kind common in American and Central European households before refrigeration, and it is a useful window into how such pickles were made. It is not a method that meets any current standard for safe fermenting or storage, and the problems are structural rather than a matter of adjusting a time or a temperature.
- The seal is the main problemFermentation produces carbon dioxide continuously for the first week or more. A jar "sealed airtight as for canned fruit" has no way to vent it, and the pressure either forces the seal or breaks the glass. Modern fermenting relies on an airlock or a loose cover precisely because this stage cannot be contained.
- The brine is weak and unmeasuredThe brine strength is uncertain -- One level tablespoon of salt is roughly 15-18 g, and a filled quart jar holds perhaps 400-500 ml of water around the cucumbers, so the brine lands somewhere between about 3 and 4.5 percent depending on how tightly the jar is packed. The salt is measured, and scaled for a two-quart jar, but the water is not. Current fermented-pickle guidance calls for a brine measured by weight, commonly around 5 percent, on the grounds that weaker brines give spoilage organisms more chance to compete with the lactobacilli that produce the protective acid.
- No acidity is verifiedThe safety of a fermented pickle rests on the brine dropping to about pH 4.6 or below and staying there. This recipe offers cloudiness clearing as the only indicator, which tells you the ferment has slowed but says nothing about how acidic it became. There is no vinegar here, and no measurement of acidity at any stage -- the salt is measured by the spoonful, and nothing else is.
- Sun and warmthSetting sealed jars in direct sun drives the interior well above the roughly 70-75F range usually recommended for a clean lactic fermentation. High temperatures favour softening enzymes and off-organisms, and the swing between daytime sun and night cooling makes the outcome unpredictable.
- A year at ambient temperatureThe claim that these keep a year in a cool dry place assumes a cellar or larder that stays genuinely cold year-round, which few modern houses have. Finished ferments today go into the refrigerator or are processed in a boiling-water canner to a tested schedule.
- If you want dill picklesUse a current tested recipe from a reputable extension service or preserving guide, which will specify brine strength by weight, fermentation temperature, duration and either refrigerated storage or a water-bath schedule.
- What the ingredients would be today"Pickles about the size of a finger" means small pickling cucumbers, not slicers; "whole peppers" most likely means whole black peppercorns; and "a piece of dill" probably means a length of stalk with the flowering head rather than chopped fronds.
Salt-brined dill pickles came into American cookbooks largely through Central and Eastern European kitchens, where cucumbers were laid down in crocks with dill heads, garlic and grape or oak leaves each summer and drawn on through the winter. The sun-jar variant recorded here is the domestic shortcut version of that crock, and it reflects a moment when glass jars with rubber-ring seals had reached ordinary households but home fermentation was still governed entirely by observation rather than measurement. The cue given for readiness, cloudy brine that later clears, is a genuine description of a lactic ferment running and then subsiding; the clearing is generally attributed to the bacteria exhausting the available sugars, though it likely owes as much to bacteria and sediment settling out. It is the only instrument this cook had, and the recipe is built around it.