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CUCUMBERS, PRESERVED (An excellent Sweetmeat for Dessert)
Choose cucumbers that are young, fresh, and nearly free from seeds, split them, cut the pieces across, take out the seeds, and lay them for three days in brine strong enough to bear an egg. Put over them a cabbage-leaf or vine-leaves to keep them down, and place a cover over the dish. At the end of that time take them out, wash them in cold water, and set them on the fire with cold water and a tiny lump of alum. As the water heats, keep adding a little more alum, until the cucumbers are a bright green, which they ought to be in a short time, and if they are not, change the water again and let them heat as before, but they must not boil. Drain them, and when cool pour over them a syrup, made by boiling a quart of water, a stick of cinnamon, one ounce of ground ginger, and one pound of loaf sugar for every pound of cucumber. Boil the cinnamon and ginger in the water for an hour, then drain it and add the sugar, and boil to a thick syrup. Let the cucumbers lie in this for two days, when the syrup must be boiled for ten minutes with them. Put the preparation into jars and leave it until next day, when it must be covered closely. These directions must be minutely attended to, or the sweetmeat will not be a success. Time, six days.
This is a Victorian candied sweetmeat, and two of its instructions put it outside what can be recommended today: an open-ended dose of alum and jars closed with no heat processing at all. The notes below explain the terms and then the specific failures.
- Unmeasured alumThe recipe gives no quantity at all, only "a tiny lump" followed by "keep adding a little more" until the colour turns, with the option to start over and heat again. Potassium alum is an aluminium salt; it is tolerable in the trace amounts once used to firm pickles, but a dose escalated by eye over repeated heatings has no upper bound, and quantities at that scale cause gastric irritation. There is no way to make this instruction safe by reading it carefully.
- Alum will not do what is claimedAlum firms pectin in the cell wall; it does not green vegetables. The bright green of nineteenth-century preserved cucumbers is generally attributed to copper: heating in an unlined copper or brass pan, so that a little copper salt formed and fixed the chlorophyll. Whether this text dropped such a step cannot be known from the page itself, but it keeps the promise of colour without giving any means of producing it, so a cook following it will keep adding alum chasing a colour alum cannot deliver.
- Sealed cold, with no processingThe cucumbers go into jars and are "covered closely" the next day, with no boiling-water bath, no headspace and no seal test. The syrup is heavy enough to be inhospitable, but a low-acid vegetable sealed at room temperature in an unprocessed jar is exactly the configuration modern preserving guidance rules out. Use a current tested recipe for sweet pickles or candied cucumber if you want to make this kind of thing.
- Brine strong enough to bear an eggThe old test for a strong salt solution. Figures quoted vary, but a brine dense enough to float an egg is generally reckoned at around 10 per cent salt, well short of saturation. Three days in it draws the cucumbers limp and leaves them intensely salty until washed.
- Loaf sugar and the quartLoaf sugar is refined white sugar, broken from the cone and the most expensive grade of its day; ordinary granulated is the equivalent. The quart here is imperial, 40 fl oz rather than 32.
- The proportions, for referenceRead as a pound of sugar per pound of prepared cucumber, this is the usual sweetmeat ratio, though the phrase "for every pound of cucumber" could be taken to scale the whole syrup. An hour's infusion of a cinnamon stick and an ounce of ground ginger, then strained, is a strong spicing by modern habit.
Preserved cucumber belongs to the long tradition of turning bland or unpromising vegetables into dessert sweetmeats -- the same impulse that candied angelica stems, marrow, carrot and green walnuts. The point was texture and translucency: a firm, glassy, jewel-coloured thing to eat at the end of dinner alongside dried fruit and nuts, at a time when out-of-season fruit was scarce and a well-stocked dessert service was a mark of a competent household. The bright green was central to the effect, and it was commonly got by heating the fruit in copper or brass vessels; the practice drew criticism through the nineteenth century from public-health writers who pointed out that the colour was a copper salt, and food-adulteration legislation of the period was used against copper-greened goods. This text expects the colour without mentioning copper -- which may be reticence, or may simply be an incomplete instruction; the page does not say.