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.
In addition, this page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Pickling Olives
We do not vouch for this recipe, as we are not able to verify it. It comes from Pomona, California. For three gallons of olives dissolve half a pound of concentrated lye in three gallons of water and add two pounds of salt. Let the olives remain in this two days. Draw off this liquid and replace with the same quantity of a fresh supply. Draw off this liquid and cover the olives with pure water, keeping them thus covered from five to eight days, renewing the water daily. When olives have lost their bitterness, drain, and cover with a brine made of one pound and a half of salt to three gallons of water. After two days draw off the brine and, finally, leave the olives in a fresh brine of a pound and a half of salt to nine quarts of water.
The olives may be put into fruit jars; fill these with brine to overflow, then put on rubbers and covers as in fruit canning. + 12 large ripe tomatoes 2 onions 3 green peppers 2 tablespoonfuls sugar
The book itself declines to stand behind this one, and that hesitation is well placed. Lye-cured olives are still made commercially and by careful home curers, but this particular set of instructions is missing every control that makes the process safe.
- The lye is the whole problemHalf a pound of "concentrated lye" in three gallons of water is a caustic solution strong enough to burn skin, eyes and lungs, and it is being applied to something that will be eaten. Modern lye-curing procedures specify food-grade sodium hydroxide, a measured concentration, and water changes verified by testing that the alkali has been leached from the flesh. This recipe does prescribe daily water changes over five to eight days, but nothing about the purity of the lye or any check that the leaching is complete.
- "Concentrated lye" is not a fixed thingAt the time this was printed the phrase covered everything from potash lye leached from wood ash to commercial caustic soda of unknown purity, sold for soapmaking and household cleaning. There is no way to translate the quantity into a known concentration, so the strength of the bath cannot be reproduced.
- No test for residual alkaliThe recipe judges doneness only by taste — "when olives have lost their bitterness." Taste alone is not a reliable guide to whether the alkali has been fully washed out. Without a phenolphthalein or pH check, there is no way to confirm the olives are free of residual lye.
- The final brine is too weak to preserveThe final brine is not a substitute for processing -- A pound and a half of salt in nine quarts is roughly 8 percent brine. Lye-cured olives are low-acid, and a brine of this strength sealed into jars with no acidification and no heat processing is not a reliable barrier to Clostridium botulinum. Commercial ripe olives are canned under pressure for this reason; the 1919 and 1920 outbreaks traced to California canned olives are the reason the standards exist.
- Sealing is not processing"Fill these with brine to overflow, then put on rubbers and covers as in fruit canning" describes closing a jar, not sterilising its contents. Fruit is acid; olives are not. The method that works for peaches does not transfer.
- The stray lines at the endThe twelve tomatoes, two onions, three green peppers and two tablespoons of sugar have nothing to do with the olives; they are the opening ingredients of some other recipe, its heading missing.
- If you want cured olivesUse a current, tested procedure from an agricultural extension service or a modern preserving manual, which will give you measured lye concentration, leaching verification and a validated processing step.
Olive curing came to California with the Spanish missions, where the Mission variety was planted for oil and table fruit, and by the 1890s the citrus and olive districts of the state — possibly including Pomona — were promoting the ripe, lye-cured black olive as a distinctly Californian product, unlike the brine-cured green olives imported from Spain and Italy. Treating the fruit with an alkali to strip out oleuropein, the compound responsible for raw olives' ferocious bitterness, is an old practice generally traced to Mediterranean use of wood-ash lye; California growers simply industrialised it with commercial caustic soda. That this recipe reached the compiler as hearsay from a Pomona correspondent, printed with an open disclaimer, shows how new and unsettled the technique still was in the American home kitchen. The gap was closed the hard way: fatal botulism outbreaks from canned ripe olives in 1919 and 1920 prompted federal and state investigation and led directly to the pressure-processing standards that govern the product today.