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Cockles, Pickled
Prepare the cockles as for sauce (see COCKLE SAUCE); strain the liquid through muslin, and put it into a saucepan with an equal quantity of vinegar, a blade of mace, and a wine-glassful of sherry or brandy to every pint of liquid. Let this boil. Put the cockles into bottles, cover them with the liquid, and cork them closely. Time to open the cockles, five minutes. Probable cost, 3d. per quart. Cockles may be used to make fish-sauce when oysters are out of season.
This is a shellfish preserve put up in corked bottles with no measured acidity and no heat processing, and it cannot be reproduced safely. The notes below explain the archaic language and then why the method fails.
- Why it is unsafe: dilutionThe pickle is cockle liquor cut with an equal volume of vinegar, so the finished acidity is roughly half that of the vinegar used and is nowhere measured. Safe pickled shellfish depends on a known pH below 4.6 throughout the jar; a 1:1 dilution with salty shellfish liquor gives no assurance of that.
- Why it is unsafe: sealed anaerobic shellfishLow-acid seafood sealed under liquid in a corked bottle and held at room temperature is a textbook environment for Clostridium botulinum, including the cold-tolerant type E strains associated with marine species. Nothing in the method destroys spores, and nothing reliably prevents their growth.
- Why it is unsafe: cooking timeThe cockles themselves get only the five minutes it takes to open them, and the boiling is done to the pickle, not to the packed bottles. There is no processing step at all once the jars are filled.
- Why it is unsafe: the closureA cork is not a reliable preserving seal. It does not exclude air dependably, and it gives no visual sign of spoilage the way a failed vacuum lid does. If you want pickled shellfish, use a current tested recipe with stated acidity and processing times.
- "Prepare as for sauce"The cross-reference sends you to the book's cockle sauce entry, where the shellfish are cleaned of sand and then heated until the shells open. Cockles are notoriously gritty and that cleaning was the point of it.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one whole dried piece, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg. Substitution tables vary, but roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace is the usual stand-in for one blade.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz (a scant quarter-cup) rather than the size of any glass in your cupboard, though the figure varied from author to author.
- Threepence a quartThe costing is pre-decimal: 3d. is three old pence, 3/240 of a pound, or about an eightieth. Cockles were a cheap shellfish, though the reason the book gives for using them is that oysters are out of season.
Cockles were gathered on the tidal flats of estuaries such as the Thames, the Dee and Burry Inlet in South Wales, raked at low water and sold by the pint or quart from barrows and stalls, which is why Cassell's can quote a price of a few pence a quart. Pickling them in spiced vinegar was the standard way of carrying a perishable, sandy, intensely seasonal shellfish beyond the day it was landed, and jars of pickled cockles remained a fixture of seaside stalls and public houses well into the twentieth century. The closing line is the practical heart of the entry: oysters in nineteenth-century Britain had a closed season and, by the later 1800s, prices climbing out of reach of the households this dictionary addressed, so the cheaper cockle was pressed into service wherever a recipe called for oyster sauce. The book's confidence in a corked bottle reflects a period before the microbiology of anaerobic spoilage was understood, when a strong vinegar and a tight cork were thought sufficient in themselves.