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Cucumbers, to Keep, for Winter Use
(German method).
Pare and slice the cucumbers. Sprinkle a little salt over them, and cover them with a dish. The next day drain off the liquor. Place the slices of cucumber in a jar, with a little salt between each layer, and tie them up. Before using rinse them in fresh water, and dress them with pepper, oil, and vinegar. Time, twenty-four hours to stand in salt. Probable cost of cucumbers, 6d. each, when in full season.
This is a salt-cure for long-term storage, and it is written in the vaguest possible terms. The quantities that decide whether it keeps or spoils are exactly the ones the book leaves out.
- The salt is unmeasured, and that is the whole problemDry-salting vegetables for months of storage depends on reaching and holding a known salt concentration by weight of vegetable. "A little salt between each layer" gives no ratio at all, and an under-salted jar of cucumber ferments and spoils rather than preserving.
- Cucumber is a low-acid vegetableThere is no vinegar, no starter, and no acidification step anywhere in the storage stage; the vinegar appears only at the table, after the jar has been opened. A sealed or covered jar of low-acid vegetable held at room temperature for weeks without measured salt or measured acid is outside any range a current preserving guide would accept.
- No temperature is given for storageA jar like this would presumably have been kept in a cold larder or cellar rather than in a modern kitchen cupboard at 65-70F, but the book says nothing about where or how cold.
- "Tie them up"In period usage this normally means covering the jar mouth with cloth, paper or bladder and tying it at the neck rather than fitting a lid. Such a cover is not an airtight seal and would not reliably keep mould or yeast off the surface.
- Peeled and sliced is the wrong start for keepingParing removes the skin and slicing exposes the whole interior, which is why the cucumbers weep so freely overnight. It also means there is no intact surface left to slow spoilage organisms down.
- The cost lineSixpence each places this in the pre-decimal British market, and the cucumbers are priced individually rather than by weight; in Britain they were commonly raised under frames or glass. It is a period price note, not part of the method.
- If you want salted cucumbersUse a current tested recipe with weighed salt, a stated brine strength and a stated storage temperature.
Cassell's labels this the "German method", and it belongs to a central and northern European habit of laying vegetables down in salt at the end of the season rather than in vinegar — the same logic behind salt-packed beans and sauerkraut, and distinct from the sharp British pickle jar. The final step, rinsing the slices and dressing them with pepper, oil and vinegar, produces something close to a German Gurkensalat out of season: what the salt bought was a cucumber salad in winter, at a time when the price note suggests fresh cucumbers were sold by the individual fruit. Compendia like this one did print such national methods alongside British recipes. The vagueness of the salting, rather than any single ingredient, is what dates the entry.