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Sour Cucumber Pickles
Select small cucumbers. Wash the cucumbers, then sprinkle with salt and cover with cold water. Use a generous cup of salt to a gallon of water. The next day drain, rinse, and pack into fruit jars, or simply in an earthen crock.
Add pepper pods, green or red, and large or small according to the receptacle used. Sprinkle in, also, a few whole spices. Cover with vinegar, scalding hot. Close fruit jars as in canning fruit; having sterilized the jars before packing in the cucumbers, the pickles will then keep indefinitely. For a greener pickle, put grape or cabbage leaves over and under the cucumbers; scald the water with the salt and pour over them; then the next day proceed as above.
This is a plain vinegar pickle of the kind that filled cellar shelves before acidity was measured, and it is the missing measurements that put it out of use. The notes below explain where it falls short of current preserving practice rather than how to rescue it.
- Vinegar strength is never statedSafe pickling depends on the finished jar sitting at pH 4.6 or below, which in practice means vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid used undiluted. Household vinegar of this period varied widely in strength, much of it home-made cider vinegar of unknown and often low acidity, so this recipe gives no way to know whether the pickles were ever acid enough to be shelf-stable.
- No heat process at allThe jars are filled with scalding vinegar and closed, and that is the end of it. Hot-fill alone does not reliably heat the interior of a packed jar of raw cucumbers, and it produces a weak, unverified seal; current practice is a timed boiling-water process for every jar of pickles.
- The crock alternative is worsePickles left in an earthen crock under vinegar of unknown strength, at room temperature, with no seal and no processing, is an environment nobody today can vouch for. Mould and yeast growth on the surface can consume the acid that is doing the preserving.
- "Keep indefinitely" is not a shelf lifeEven correctly processed pickles are given about a year for quality. The phrase here reflects a period confidence in sterilised glass rather than any test of the contents, and it is the reason recipes of this vintage should not be followed as written.
- The salt is a holding brine, not a preservativeA generous cup of salt to a gallon of water is roughly a 6 to 7 percent brine, used overnight to firm the cucumbers and draw out water. It is rinsed away before packing, so it contributes nothing to keeping the finished jar.
- Fruit jars"Fruit jars" means glass Mason-type jars with a zinc cap and rubber ring, the standard closure of the period. Two-piece lids with a flat sealing disc did not become general until later, and the sealing behaviour of the two is not comparable.
- If you want sour cucumber picklesUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar percentage, a stated headspace and a stated processing time. The flavourings here, whole spices and a green or red pepper pod per jar, translate directly into such a recipe.
Sour cucumber pickles are among the plainest kinds of American pickling: a salt brine overnight to draw water out of the cucumber, then hot vinegar and whole spices, with no sugar at all to distinguish them from the sweet and mustard pickles that share the shelf. The grape or cabbage leaves at the top and bottom of the jar are an old trick with some basis rather than pure superstition, since grape leaves are held to carry tannins that inhibit the enzymes responsible for softening a pickle, and the leaves were also credited with the greener colour the recipe promises, without recourse to the alum or the copper kettle that some books of the era recommended for the same purpose. Instructions of this kind predate the acidity and processing research that later gave preservers numbers to work with, which is why they read so confidently and specify so little.