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Garlic Pickle
Divide one pound of cloves of garlic, take off the skins, and lay them in a dish. Strew salt plentifully over them, and let them stand for two or three days. Wipe them, and lay them in the sun to dry. Put one quart of vinegar into a preserving-pan, with a tea-spoonful of salt, one ounce of whole pepper, and one ounce of bruised mustard-seed. Boil quickly, remove the scum, and throw in the garlic for three minutes only. Pour into an earthen jar, and, when cold, tie a bladder or four or five folds of paper tightly over the pickle. The vinegar must cover the garlic, and as it becomes absorbed, a little more may be added.
A straightforward vinegar pickle whose only tricky steps are the long salting and the very short boil. The three-minute limit is the hinge: garlic left in boiling vinegar longer turns flabby and loses its bite.
- Three minutes means three minutesThe cloves are meant to be scalded, not cooked. Drop them into the boiling spiced vinegar, count the time, and pour everything into the jar at once so they stop firming up in the pan.
- A pound of garlicRoughly eight to twelve average heads, giving something close to a quart jar once packed. Loosen the skins by pressing the cloves flat with the side of a knife, or cover them with warm water for a minute; a paring knife on a hundred-odd cloves is a long evening.
- The salting stageTwo or three days in plenty of coarse salt (not iodised table salt) draws out water so the cloves stay crisp. Set the dish on a rack or tilt it so the brine that forms can drain away, and keep it cool rather than in a warm kitchen.
- "Lay them in the sun to dry"The point is a dry surface, not sun. Spread the wiped cloves on a rack in a draught for a few hours, or in an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar.
- Weights and measuresOne quart of vinegar in an English book of this date is an imperial quart, about 40 fl oz or 5 US cups; use something at 5 per cent acidity, cider or malt for flavour. An ounce of whole peppercorns is about 4 tablespoons and an ounce of bruised mustard seed about 2 1/2 tablespoons — generous by modern taste, so scale back if you prefer.
- Bladder and paperSubstitute a sterilised glass jar with a vinegar-proof plastic-lined or plastic lid; bare metal corrodes and taints the pickle. Because the jar is not heat-processed, keep it in the refrigerator and use it within a few months.
- If it turns blueGarlic pickled in acid sometimes goes blue-green, a reaction of its sulphur compounds in acid conditions; trace metals are often blamed, though the colour can appear without them. It is harmless and generally fades with keeping.
- Topping up and timingCheck the jar for the first week or two and add more vinegar whenever the cloves are not fully submerged. The flavour is harsh at first; give it four to six weeks before serving alongside cold meat, cheese or curry.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English pickle shelf, when a well-run household put up walnuts, onions, cucumbers, mushrooms, cauliflower and nasturtium buds each autumn to carry sharpness through a winter of cold joints and made dishes. Garlic is the odd one out here: nineteenth-century English cookery writers were famously wary of it, often warning that the merest suspicion of it was enough, and its appearance as a pickle in its own right is unusual enough to be worth noting. The method itself is the standard formula of the period — dry-salt to draw out moisture, dry the surface, then scald in boiling vinegar and pour the hot pickle into the jar — and the bladder tied over the mouth of the jar was the ordinary Victorian seal, used before glass jars with rubber-ringed lids became cheap enough for the domestic kitchen.