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Nectarines, Pickled
Gather the nectarines when fully grown, but not quite ripe. Look them over carefully, remove any that are at all blemished, and put the rest into salt and water sufficiently strong to float an egg; lay a thin board over the fruit to keep it well under water, and leave it for two or three days. At the end of that time drain it well, dry it with a soft cloth, put it into pickling jars, and cover entirely with good white wine vinegar. Put half a blade of mace, six cloves, a piece of whole ginger, and a quarter of a pint of mustard-seed with each quart of vinegar. Tie down the jars securely, and store in a cool dry place. The pickle will be ready for use in two months. Keep the nectarines well covered with vinegar.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle of the old English kind, with a long salt soak first. Nothing is cooked, so success rests entirely on the strength of the brine and the acidity of the vinegar.
- Strong enough to float an eggThis is the standard Victorian brine gauge. It corresponds to something like 10 per cent salt by weight — on the order of three-quarters of a cup of coarse salt to each quart of water, though the exact figure varies with the salt used. Test it as directed: a raw egg in the shell should bob with a small patch of shell above the surface.
- Vinegar acidity is the whole safeguardUse a white wine vinegar labelled at 5 per cent acetic acid or higher, undiluted. Wine vinegars sold for salad dressing are sometimes weaker, and a weak vinegar on raw fruit is the one way this pickle can go wrong.
- A quarter of a pint of mustard-seedThat is half a cup of whole yellow mustard seed per quart of vinegar, which is a great deal by modern taste but is doing preservative work as well as flavouring.
- Mace, cloves and gingerA blade of mace is one piece of the lacy aril from around a nutmeg; half a blade is about a quarter-teaspoon of ground mace if you cannot find it whole. "A piece of whole ginger" means dried root, not fresh — a knob about an inch long, bruised with the flat of a knife.
- Jars and covers"Tie down securely" would have meant a cover such as a bladder or waxed cloth tied over the jar; the recipe does not specify. Use glass jars with plastic or plastic-lined lids; vinegar corrodes bare metal and will taint the pickle and pit the lid.
- Choosing the fruitFully grown but still hard is right. Anything approaching ripe risks collapsing during the two or three days' brining, and the recipe is emphatic about removing any blemished fruit.
- Keeping them underThe instruction to keep the fruit covered with vinegar is the hinge of the recipe. Fruit that rises above the surface will mould, and the board used during brining is worth replicating in the jar with a small glass weight or a fermentation disc.
- Timing and keepingThe recipe gives two months in a cool dry place before the spices and vinegar have penetrated the flesh. Store in the refrigerator once opened, and discard the jar entirely if the vinegar goes cloudy, ropy or slimy rather than simply darkening.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve as a sharp relish with cold ham, tongue, game or hard cheese, a few slices at a time.
Pickled fruit occupies a large corner of nineteenth-century English cookery books, where peaches, nectarines, plums, walnuts and even melon rind were put down in spiced vinegar to be eaten alongside cold roast meat and raised pies — the same role now filled by chutney. The nectarine is simply a smooth-skinned peach, grown in Britain against south-facing walls and under glass in the kitchen gardens of large houses, which is why a book aimed at ambitious households assumes a glut of underripe ones in late summer. The "strong enough to float an egg" test for brine is far older than the recipe and appears throughout the period in directions for salting meat and fish as well as fruit; it survived because it needed no scales, only an egg. Long spiced-vinegar keeping of this sort was ordinary domestic economy, a way of holding a short harvest through the winter without sugar or ice.