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Pickled Limes
Carefully washed limes should be placed in stone crocks and covered with brine made of salt and water. A plate with a weight should be placed on top. After standing for four days, they will be ready for use and should be taken out only as needed.
Pickled Limes No. 2 Make a brine strong enough to float an egg and, in quantity, to cover a dozen limes. Let stand six days, stirring the brine each day.
Drain and set to boil in two quarts of boiling water. Let boil fifteen minutes. Let drain and become cold. Scald one quart of vinegar, half an ounce of cloves, half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of ginger root, half an ounce of horseradish, and one ounce of white mustard seed and pour over the limes disposed in fruit jars.
Close securely. These are best after keeping some months.
Two methods sit side by side here: a plain salt cure meant to be dipped into over days, and a spiced vinegar pickle intended for long keeping. Both depend on limes being acidic enough to look after themselves, but neither is a processed, shelf-stable canning recipe by modern standards.
- The hinge: keep everything submergedLimes float, and any fruit that rises above the brine or vinegar will mould. The plate and weight in No. 1 are not optional, and in No. 2 the jars must be filled so the liquid covers the fruit completely.
- "Strong enough to float an egg"The old test for a strong brine, usually reckoned at around 10 percent salt, well short of saturation. In practice roughly 1 cup of pickling salt to 2 quarts of water, dissolved cold and tested with a raw egg in the shell. Pickling or kosher salt is preferable; iodised table salt and its anti-caking agents are often said to cloud the brine.
- Stone crocks and fruit jarsA glazed stoneware crock, food-grade plastic bucket or glass bowl all work; do not use bare metal or a chipped glazed vessel, since brine and lime juice will attack both. "Fruit jars" means ordinary Mason jars, and modern two-piece lids are fine.
- Storage, since the book does not sayNeither version is heat-processed, so the safest course is to treat both as refrigerator pickles: keep the crock and the filled jars cold. "Best after keeping some months" presumably assumes a cool cellar rather than a warm pantry.
- The fifteen-minute boilThe book gives no reason, but boiling in two quarts of fresh water rather than the brine would draw out excess salt and soften the peel before it takes the spiced vinegar. Follow the instruction to drain and let the fruit become cold before adding the vinegar.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar. "Scald" means bring to just under a boil with the spices and hold a minute or two, long enough to extract them, then pour hot over the limes.
- The spicesHalf an ounce is roughly 2 tablespoons of whole cloves or of sliced dry ginger root; blade mace is much lighter, so half an ounce fills a considerably larger volume. An ounce of white mustard seed is about 2 to 3 tablespoons. Horseradish means fresh root, peeled and sliced or coarsely grated. Tie the small spices in cheesecloth if you would rather not strain them out later.
- YieldA dozen limes with a quart of vinegar will fill roughly three to four pint jars. Serve them cut in halves or quarters as a sharp relish alongside cold meat or curry.
Pickled limes were a real fixture of nineteenth-century American life, and their most famous appearance is in fiction: in Little Women, Amy March trades on pickled limes as schoolroom currency and is disgraced for smuggling them into class. They reached Northern cities in barrels of brine from the West Indies, the salt cure serving as preservation rather than seasoning, and children bought them by the piece from grocers and confectioners. The two recipes here have different aims: No. 1 gives a plain brined lime, ready in four days and eaten as a sour snack, while No. 2 turns it into a spiced vinegar condiment in the English pickle tradition, with cloves, mace, ginger, horseradish and mustard seed -- a spice list of the sort used for other pickles of the period. The instruction to age it for months places it among the store-cupboard pickles rather than the sweetmeats.