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Sweet Cucumber Pickles
Prepare as sour pickles, except add sugar to taste to the vinegar, when scalding it. Sprinkle white and black mustard seed, pieces of horseradish, ginger root, green and red peppers through the cans. Green nasturtium seeds are a good addition to sweet cucumber or tomato pickles.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe, and it depends entirely on a "sour pickles" recipe elsewhere in the book. Even with that recipe in hand, the method belongs to an era before anyone measured acidity, and it cannot be followed safely today.
- No acid ratio at allThe vinegar's strength is unstated and its quantity is inherited from the underlying sour pickle recipe, while sugar is added "to taste." Added sugar dilutes the vinegar in the finished brine, so a sweet pickle made this way may not reliably stay below the pH 4.6 threshold that keeps Clostridium botulinum dormant. Tested modern pickle recipes fix the vinegar-to-water-to-sugar proportions for exactly this reason.
- Period vinegar was not standardisedHousehold vinegar of this period was often homemade cider vinegar of unknown and variable strength. A recipe written for strong barrel vinegar gives no safety margin when made with a modern 5 percent bottled product.
- Scald-and-seal is open-kettle canningScald-and-seal is likely open-kettle canning -- If the underlying sour pickle recipe works by pouring scalded vinegar over cucumbers in the jar and sealing, that method is no longer considered safe: the jar contents never reach a controlled temperature for a measured time, and the seal that forms on cooling is unreliable.
- The additions are all low-acidHorseradish, ginger root, fresh green and red peppers and nasturtium seeds are low-acid vegetable matter distributed "through the cans." They raise the pH of the pack locally and add soil-borne spores, which is precisely the situation a tested, processed recipe is designed to control.
- No salt measurementAny salt comes from the underlying sour pickle recipe rather than being stated here. If that recipe is a fermented or brined cucumber, the salt concentration is doing preservative work and is not something to adjust by eye.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested sweet pickle recipe from a extension service or a modern preserving manual, which will specify vinegar percentage, headspace and boiling-water processing time. The flavourings listed here — mustard seed, horseradish, ginger, peppers — transfer perfectly well into such a recipe.
- Nasturtium seedsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus are edible and were widely used as a caper substitute. They are safe to eat; the problem is the preserving method around them, not the ingredient.
Sweet cucumber pickles sit at the point where the American pantry began treating vinegar as a flavour rather than purely as a preservative. Nineteenth-century sour and salt pickles were preserving staples; the sweet, spiced versions that fill turn-of-the-century canning manuals reflect cheaper refined sugar and the growing habit of serving a relish alongside cold meat. The suggestion of nasturtium seeds is older than the book — the pickled pods were a standard kitchen-garden substitute for imported capers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and appear in English household books as well as American ones. What dates this entry most sharply is what it leaves out: it assumes any cook already knows how strong her vinegar is and how long a jar should stand, because she learned it from someone rather than from a book.