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GHERKINS, PICKLED (French method)
Throw the gherkins into a saucepan of boiling water, let them boil one minute, then take them out, and throw them at once into plenty of cold water; change the water once or twice, and when the gherkins are quite cold, spread them on sieves to dry. Put them into a large bowl, and pour over them as much boiling vinegar as will completely cover them. Let them stand in this for twenty-four hours, and repeat the process for three days. The last time, boil in the vinegar one ounce of salt, half an ounce of whole pepper, a few sprigs of tarragon, a large blade of mace, and four bay-leaves, with every quart of liquid. Put the gherkins into the boiling vinegar, let them remain for two minutes, then place them in wide-mouthed bottles, and pour the vinegar over them. Cork the bottles securely, and put away for use. More vinegar must be added when required. Probable cost, 1s. per pint bottle.
A straight vinegar pickle with no sugar and no brine stage, relying on repeated soakings in boiling vinegar to draw out water and set the texture. A few of the assumptions behind it need translating.
- The hinge: dry them properlyAfter the one-minute boil and the cold-water shock, the gherkins must be spread out and dried until the surface is genuinely dry to the touch. Water clinging to the skins dilutes the vinegar with every pour and is the usual reason a pickle of this kind turns soft or cloudy.
- Which cucumbersGherkins here means small immature pickling cucumbers, roughly 2-3 inches, firm and prickly-skinned. Slicing cucumbers will not hold up. Pick over the batch and discard any with soft ends.
- Vinegar strengthAssume a vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity; a period recipe would have used malt or white wine vinegar. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength, since the vinegar is the only preservative in the recipe.
- Pans and bowlsBoil the vinegar in stainless steel or enamel and steep in glass or glazed china. Untinned copper and bare aluminium react with hot vinegar. Older cooks sometimes used copper deliberately to green pickles; that practice is genuinely poisonous and has no place here.
- The spice quantitiesPer quart of vinegar: 1 oz salt is about 28 g, half an ounce of whole peppercorns about 14 g, which is roughly two tablespoons. A "large blade of mace" is one whole piece of the lacy aril, often reckoned as about half a teaspoon ground.
- The three-day cyclePour boiling vinegar over and leave twenty-four hours, then repeat, over about three days; the recipe does not say whether the vinegar is reused or renewed each time, nor is the exact number of soakings spelled out. The salt and spices are added only to the final boil.
- Bottles and storageCorked bottles are not a hermetic seal. Use clean glass jars with vinegar-proof plastic-lined lids, make sure the gherkins stay fully submerged, and keep them in the refrigerator or a cold larder. These were never heat-processed and should be treated as a keeping-in-the-cold pickle, not a shelf-stable canned good.
- Waiting and yieldThe recipe gives no maturing time or quantity of gherkins; as a rough guide they will be edible after a week and better after several weeks, and a quart of spiced vinegar will cover something in the region of 2 lb of small gherkins. The "1s. per pint bottle" is the book's own 19th-century costing and is of historical interest only.
The "French method" of the title sets this apart from the English practice of salting cucumbers in brine before pickling; this version blanches instead and then works entirely with hot vinegar, giving a sharper, less sweet result than sugared British pickles. The seasoning here -- tarragon, mace and bay -- reads as French rather than the mustard seed and ginger of an English pickle jar. The word gherkin is usually traced to an early modern Dutch diminutive, reconstructed as gurkkijn, reflecting the Low Countries trade in small pickling cucumbers.