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Pickled String Beans
Select tender beans without strings if possible.
Keep them full length, but snip off the ends and remove the strings, if present. Cover the beans with brine, one fourth a cup of salt to a quart of water, and let stand over night. Drain, rinse in cold water, and dry on a cloth. Pack the beans in sterilized jars, adding a chili pepper here and there. For each quart jar take a quart of vinegar, half a cup of brown sugar, a teaspoonful of white mustard seed, and half a teaspoonful of celery seed; heat to the boiling point and fill each jar to overflow; seal as canned food.
Pickled Beans No. 2 Prepare the beans as for cooking, but keep them full length; sprinkle with salt, cover with water, and let stand over night; drain, rinse in cold water, and drain again; pack in fruit jars, adding meanwhile black and white mustard seed and bits of horseradish. Pour in vinegar, scalding hot, to fill the jars to overflow, close the jars as in canning.
This is a raw-pack vinegar pickle for a low-acid vegetable, sealed with nothing but hot liquid and no heat processing afterward. That is the reason it cannot be recommended today, and most of what follows explains why.
- No processing step at allVersion 1 ends "seal as canned food" and version 2 "close the jars as in canning" — that is, fill the jar to overflowing with boiling liquid and close it. Nothing in the sequence brings the interior of a packed quart of whole beans to a temperature or holding time that would destroy spoilage organisms, and a sealed, oxygen-poor jar of low-acid vegetables is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores can survive and grow.
- The acidity is unverifiableVersion 1 dilutes a quart of vinegar with half a cup of brown sugar and, more importantly, with the water the beans carry into the jar. Version 2 gives no measurement for the vinegar at all. Household vinegar of this period was not reliably labelled to a stated acetic-acid strength the way 5 percent vinegar is now, so there is no way to establish that the finished pack sits below the pH at which botulinum cannot grow.
- Green beans are the classic low-acid caseBeans, unlike cucumbers in a strong brine or fruit in syrup, have essentially no acid of their own. Every current guideline treats pickled beans as a product that requires either a measured vinegar strength plus a timed boiling-water bath, or pressure canning if packed unacidified. This recipe does neither.
- The overnight salt stand is not a preservative hereA quarter cup of salt to a quart of water is a brining strength, not a curing one, and the beans are then rinsed (and in version 1 dried on a cloth), which removes most of it. It firms the beans and draws out water; it does not make them shelf-stable, and it should not be read as a curing step.
- "Chili pepper" and the seedsFor context: white mustard seed is the pale yellow seed sold simply as yellow mustard seed today. The recipe does not say whether the chili peppers scattered "here and there" through the jar are fresh or dried pods. Neither they nor the seeds contribute meaningful preservation.
- If you want the resultThe flavour being aimed at is the familiar spiced whole-bean pickle. Use a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength and a timed processing method, or keep an unprocessed batch in the refrigerator as a short-keeping fresh pickle rather than sealing it for the pantry.
Marion Harris Neil's Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making belongs to the wave of American preserving manuals published around the time of the First World War, when home food storage was framed as both thrift and patriotism, and when the science of botulism in home-canned vegetables was only beginning to be understood — the landmark American work identifying the organism in spoiled home packs came in the years just after books like this one were written. What the recipe records is a moment when the technique was traditional and well established but the safety margin it depended on — vinegar of reliable strength, and heat applied to the sealed jar — had not yet been written down.