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Cucumbers, Pickled
If the cucumbers are very young and small they may be pickled whole, if not, they are better cut into thick slices. Sprinkle salt rather plentifully over them, and let them remain twenty-four hours. Drain them from the juice, dry them in a cloth, and pour over them boiling vinegar, with half an ounce of mustard-seed, one ounce of salt, one ounce of long pepper, half a bruised nutmeg, and a pinch of cayenne to every quart of vinegar. Cover them closely, and let them remain until next day, when the vinegar must again be boiled and poured over the cucumbers, and this process repeated each day for four days. They should then be covered closely, and care should be taken with these, as with all pickles, that they are thoroughly covered with vinegar. It is best to pickle cucumbers by themselves, as they are apt to become mouldy. If any sign of this appears (and they should be looked at every three or four weeks to ascertain it, and on this account should be kept in a wide-mouthed glass bottle instead of an earthen jar), put them into a fresh dry bottle, boil the vinegar up again, and pour it over them. Time to pickle, one week. Probable cost of cucumbers, 4d. to 6d. each.
A straightforward cold-pack vinegar pickle, but the repeated boiling-and-pouring over four days does the real work, and one ingredient has largely left the shops.
- The hinge: reboil and repour, don't boil the cucumbersThe cucumbers are never cooked. Hot vinegar is poured over them and drained off, reboiled and poured again, once a day for four days. Each cycle drives out more water and drives acid in while keeping the flesh firm; simmering the cucumbers in the vinegar instead gives you limp, hollow slices.
- Salting first is not optionalThe twenty-four-hour dry salting pulls out the water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar below a safe and palatable acidity. Drain and pat genuinely dry — dilution by pooled brine is one likely cause of the mould the recipe warns about, though the book itself simply says cucumbers are apt to go mouldy.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity — malt or cider vinegar suits the spicing. Do not thin it with water, and do not reuse vinegar from an earlier batch of pickles; it has already been diluted by the vegetables.
- The weights, in modern measurePer quart (roughly a litre) of vinegar: half an ounce of mustard seed is a tablespoon or so, an ounce of salt about 2 tablespoons of pickling salt, an ounce of long pepper a generous handful of the dried spikes — best weighed, since the volume varies with their size. Use pickling or kosher salt rather than iodised table salt, which can cloud the brine.
- Long pepperPiper longum, a relative of black pepper sold as small dried catkins, hotter and more resinous. Spice merchants still carry it; whole black peppercorns with a couple of allspice berries are the closest common substitute, though the flavour is not identical.
- Nutmeg and cayenne"Half a bruised nutmeg" means half a whole nutmeg cracked with the flat of a knife, not grated — grated nutmeg will cloud the vinegar and settle as sludge. Tie the whole spices in muslin if you want a clear brine you can reboil cleanly each day.
- Storage, which is where the book is of its timeThis is a vinegar pickle, not a heat-processed preserve: nothing is sealed and nothing reaches a sterilising temperature. The advice to inspect for mould every three or four weeks reflects a cool Victorian larder. Keep the jar in the refrigerator and eat within a couple of months, and if you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested canning recipe instead.
- Yield and jarsThe recipe never says how many cucumbers a quart of spiced vinegar will cover; judge it by packing the jar and topping up so everything stays submerged, as the book insists. The instruction to use a wide-mouthed glass bottle rather than an earthen jar still holds, for the reason the book gives: you can see trouble coming.
Cucumbers arrived in the English pickle jar early and never left; "pickle" itself is usually traced to Middle Dutch pekel, brine, and the small pickling cucumber was long called a gherkin, from a Dutch diminutive of gurk. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century, pickles were a fixture of the cold table alongside bread and cheese, and commercial makers were turning them out in quantity — which is part of why domestic manuals grew so insistent about method. The period's other trick, greening pickles by boiling them in a copper pan or with a lump of alum, is absent here; some Victorian authorities had begun warning against it, and this recipe leaves the cucumbers their duller colour. The costing is the most dated line on the page: fourpence to sixpence apiece is a price for cucumbers sold singly, a garden luxury rather than the by-the-bushel commodity a modern pickler buys.