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Sweet Pickled Blackberries
3 pounds sugar 1 pint vinegar 5 pounds blackberries Ground cinnamon Ground cloves Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar; skim, add the berries, and let simmer until thick. When nearly cooked, add the spices to suit the taste.
Spiced, Pickled Crab Apples 7 pounds crab apples 3½ pounds sugar 3 cups vinegar Whole cloves 3 ounces stick cinnamon I to 3 cups water The method of preparing this pickle depends somewhat on the variety of crab apple. Hard crab apples need to be steamed a short time in a little water before the syrup is added. With soft crab apples, press one or two cloves into each apple, make a syrup of the sugar, vinegar, and water, add the cinnamon and the crab apples a few at a time, and let cook until tender but whole; remove the crab apples to jars as they are cooked; when all are done, reduce the syrup and fill the jars to overflow. With hard crab apples, cook till somewhat tender in water, then use this water in making the syrup, then return the apples to the syrup and finish as before. Before cooking, remove blossom end, wash, and wipe. Retain part of the stems. 7 pounds peaches 5 pounds sugar 1 pint vinegar
Three recipes have run together here: sweet pickled blackberries, spiced crab apples, and the opening ingredient line of a peach pickle whose method was lost in the page break. Only the first two can be followed as written.
- The hinge: cook the syrup, not the berriesThe hinge: make the syrup first -- The recipe has the sugar dissolved in the vinegar and skimmed before the berries go in. Getting the syrup made and hot first is generally held to help the blackberries hold their shape rather than break down.
- "Simmer until thick"The recipe gives neither time nor temperature; judge it by eye, at a bare simmer. Stir as little as possible, and lift the berries out with a slotted spoon if the syrup still needs reducing.
- SkimmingThe scum is froth and impurities thrown up as the sugar dissolves. Modern granulated sugar throws off very little, so the instruction may be a two-second job.
- Vinegar strengthVinegar of the period was not standardised as it is now. Use commercial cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent; do not substitute homemade or a low-acid wine vinegar, since the preservation depends on the acid as much as the sugar.
- Spices added lateGround cinnamon and cloves go in near the end for a reason — long boiling makes clove in particular turn bitter and medicinal. Start with a scant teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of cloves for 5 lb of fruit and taste up.
- Crab apples: stem and blossom endThe recipe has you remove the blossom end, wash and wipe the fruit, and keep part of the stems. The retained stem plausibly gives the fruit something to be handled by; the blossom end is the part that traps debris.
- SealingThe original assumes open-kettle packing — hot fruit into hot jars, lid on, no further processing. That practice is no longer considered reliable. Follow a current tested boiling-water-bath schedule for sweet pickled fruit, or simply keep the finished jars in the refrigerator and eat them within a month or two.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield, and how much you end with depends on how far the syrup is reduced and how tightly the fruit packs. Have several pint jars ready rather than counting on a fixed number.
Sweet pickling — fruit cooked in a syrup of sugar and vinegar, spiced with cinnamon and clove — belongs to a long European tradition of sweet-sour fruit preserves, and it persisted in American and British home canning after sweet-sour flavours had largely left the rest of the menu. These preserves were eaten with meat: a dish of spiced crab apples or pickled peaches beside cold ham or roast pork did the work that chutney or cranberry sauce does now. Crab apples were a familiar dooryard tree, valued for jelly, their hard, sour fruit poor for eating out of hand but high in the pectin and acid that make them behave well in syrup. The instruction to steam hard varieties first, then build the syrup from that cooking water, reads as a practical variation drawn from experience of different fruit.