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Gherkins, Pickled
Put the gherkins into a large stone jar, and cover them with brine strong enough to carry an egg. Place the cover on the jar, and leave it for two or three days, until the gherkins begin to turn yellow; then drain them, and pour boiling vinegar over them. Put bay-leaves on the top, keep the jar in a warm place, and heat the vinegar afresh every day, till the gherkins turn as green as you wish. Boil fresh vinegar, and with it one large blade of mace, two ounces of whole pepper, four bay-leaves, and half a dozen small silver onions to each quart. Put the gherkins into wide-mouthed bottles, pour the vinegar over them, first allowing it to cool a little, or it will crack the bottles, and cork securely when cold. Time, from a week to a fortnight. Probable cost, 1s. per pint bottle.
A straightforward two-stage vinegar pickle: a heavy salt cure, then repeated hot vinegar until the fruit greens. Most of the work is in the greening, which is cosmetic rather than preservative.
- Brine "strong enough to carry an egg"The old float test, usually reckoned at roughly 10 per cent salt by weight, about 100 g per litre of water. The measure is genuinely approximate; float a raw egg and add salt until it rises, and use pickling or kosher salt, since iodised table salt with anti-caking agents can cloud the liquid.
- The greening is the hingeDraining, then pouring boiling vinegar over the gherkins and reheating that vinegar daily for a week or more is what turns them from yellow to green. Each cycle also cooks them further, so stop as soon as the colour is acceptable — a fortnight of daily scalding gives soft pickles.
- Use 5 per cent vinegarVictorian malt vinegar varied; modern distilled or malt vinegar at 5 per cent acetic acid is what keeps the jars safe. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid "drinking" vinegar.
- VesselsA "stone jar" is a glazed stoneware crock. Antique crocks may have lead in the glaze and should not be used for anything acidic; a food-grade plastic bucket or a glass jar does the same job. Warming the bottles before filling, as well as letting the vinegar cool a little, prevents cracking.
- IngredientsA blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril of nutmeg, about a teaspoon crumbled. "Silver onions" are small silver-skinned pickling onions, sold as cocktail or pearl onions. Two ounces of whole peppercorns per quart is around 55 g — a heavy hand by modern taste; half that is plenty.
- Sealing and storage"Cork securely" assumed a cool larder and fairly rapid use. Use glass jars with vinegar-proof plastic-lined lids — bare metal corrodes — and keep the finished pickles in the refrigerator, checking that the gherkins stay fully submerged in vinegar.
- CrispnessThe repeated scalding is the enemy of texture. If crunch matters more than colour, cure in the brine overnight rather than for days, pack raw into jars, and pour the spiced vinegar over once; a grape, oak or blackcurrant leaf in each jar adds tannin that helps firm the skins.
- YieldA quart of spiced vinegar will cover roughly 2 lb of small gherkins, filling two to three pint jars. The stated "1s. per pint bottle" is the book's own period estimate, not a cost you can use.
Gherkins reached English kitchens along with the word itself, generally traced through Dutch gurkje to a Slavic root also behind Polish ogórek; by the nineteenth century the small ridge cucumber grown specifically for pickling was a staple of the cold table alongside chutneys and bottled sauces that Britain's Indian trade had made fashionable. The insistence on green pickles in books like Cassell's has a darker background: commercial picklers had long greened their wares with copper, and Frederick Accum's Treatise on Adulterations of Food (1820) and later Arthur Hill Hassall's analyses for The Lancet publicised the verdigris in shop-bought jars. Domestic recipes such as this one, greening slowly with repeatedly reheated vinegar in a warm place, were the safe answer to a fashion for colour that the trade had been meeting with poison — which is why the method is described in such patient detail for what is, in the end, a matter of appearance.