Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cranberries, to Pickle
Cranberries, to Pickle
Gather the clusters before they are fully ripe. Put them into jars and cover them with strong salt and water. When fermentation begins, drain them, and add fresh salt and water. Keep the jars closely covered. They are ready for use in a week or two. Probable cost, fresh fruit, uncertain; bottled, 8d. or 10d. per bottle.
This is a brine cure rather than a vinegar pickle, and it is written in the loose style of a period storekeeping note rather than as a tested preserving method. The points below explain the units and the reasoning, and then why the procedure should not be followed.
- No measured salt"Strong salt and water" is the whole specification. Safe brine curing depends on a known salt concentration held against a known weight of fruit; without it there is no way to tell whether the brine will suppress spoilage organisms or merely slow them. A current, tested preserving recipe should be used instead.
- Sealed jars during active fermentationThe instruction to keep the jars "closely covered" while fermentation is underway invites gas pressure to build in a rigid glass vessel. The recipe does not say what kind of cover or vessel was intended, and a modern sealed jar does not vent.
- Surface growth on a cold brineAn unheated, unacidified brine held at room temperature for weeks grows kahm yeast and moulds at the surface, and the recipe gives no instruction to skim, weight the fruit below the liquid, or discard on spoilage. Cranberries float, which makes this worse.
- Underripe wild fruitUnderripe fruit -- Gathering "before they are fully ripe" may have been intended to keep the fruit firm in brine, but it also means field soil and leaf debris going straight into a cold jar with no wash, blanch or heat step specified.
- What the money means8d. or 10d. is eight to ten pence in pre-decimal currency, and it is the price quoted for a shop-bought bottle. For fresh fruit the entry gives no figure at all: "probable cost, fresh fruit, uncertain."
- Salted, not pickled, in the modern senseNothing here is vinegar or sugar. The product is a salt-preserved fruit, which would need rinsing and soaking before use; the recipe itself says nothing about how it was to be served.
- If you want preserved cranberriesCranberries freeze well whole and raw.
Cassell's was a British book, and cranberries were a slightly awkward ingredient for it: the small native European cranberry, Vaccinium oxycoccos, grew on northern bogs but was never a reliable market crop, while the larger American cranberry was shipped over in barrels of water. The berries keep unusually well -- they are very acidic and naturally contain benzoic acid -- and cranberries were commonly stored simply covered in cold water. Salting fruit and vegetables down in strong brine was a general preserving habit of the era, applied also to beans, samphire and walnuts. In Britain cranberries were chiefly used for a sauce served with turkey and game, though this entry does not say so.