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Onions, Pickled, with Cucumbers
Take a moderate-sized onion with three cucumbers. Peel and slice them, and remove the seeds out of the cucumbers. Put the slices in a colander. Sprinkle salt over them, and leave them twenty-four hours to drain, then place them in a large earthen jar, and pour over them sufficient boiling vinegar to cover them. Tie a bladder over them, and place the jar near the fire. Boil up the vinegar every day, pour it upon the pickle, and cover the jar instantly, so that none of the steam may escape. Repeat this until the cucumbers are green; and add an ounce of whole pepper to every quart of vinegar the last time of boiling. Store in a cool, dry place. The vinegar of this pickle is excellent for salads. Time, four or five days. Probable cost of onions, 1 1/2d. each; cucumbers, 1s.
A small-batch vinegar pickle in the Victorian manner, built on repeated pourings of boiling vinegar rather than a sealed jar. The method works, but the quantities and the closure need translating.
- The hinge: keep everything submergedThe pickle keeps because the vegetables sit under full-strength vinegar, not because the jar is sealed. Any slice riding above the surface will spoil; weight the contents down or top up with more boiling vinegar.
- Yield is tinyYield is small -- one onion and three cucumbers, sliced and drained, will fill something on the order of a quart jar, and the recipe's own reference to 'every quart of vinegar' suggests as much. Scale the whole thing up by four or five if you want a useful quantity, keeping the one-to-three ratio.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity (malt or cider suits the flavour). Check the label and avoid anything diluted, which will not hold the pickle.
- The salting stageTwenty-four hours in salt in a colander is not seasoning, it is dehydration — it draws water out so the slices stay firm and do not weaken the vinegar. Rinse and pat dry before the vinegar goes on if you want a less salty result.
- \"Tie a bladder over them\""Tie a bladder over them" -- A bladder, pig's or ox, was a common close cover before rubber rings. A glass jar with a plastic-lined lid does the same job; do not clamp a hot jar shut expecting a preserving seal, because this is not a processed canning recipe.
- \"Place the jar near the fire\""Place the jar near the fire" -- That means a warm spot beside the hearth; no temperature is given. In a modern kitchen keep the jar at room temperature during the four or five days of reboiling, then refrigerate it and treat it as a fresh pickle to be eaten within a couple of months.
- \"Until the cucumbers are green\""Until the cucumbers are green" -- If the colour never quite arrives, the pickle is still perfectly good; do not chase it with copper pans or additives, which is how the effect used to be faked.
- Whole pepperAn ounce per quart is about 28 g of black peppercorns per litre of vinegar, which is a heavy dose by modern taste. Half that gives plenty of heat, and the peppercorns should go in whole so the vinegar stays clear enough to use on salads as suggested.
- The prices1 1/2d. and 1s. are pre-decimal pence and shillings; they date the book rather than help you shop, and the shilling shows cucumbers cost markedly more than the onions.
Cassell's places this among its long roster of household pickles, the Victorian answer to a glut of garden produce and to a winter diet short on anything sharp. The technique — salt to draw the water, then successive floods of boiling spiced vinegar over several days — predates reliable sealed jars, and the bladder tied over the mouth was the ordinary domestic closure of the period. The instruction to carry on \"until the cucumbers are green\" is worth noting: greening pickles was a Georgian and Victorian obsession, and the shortcut was to boil them in brass or copper, a practice Frederick Accum attacked in his 1820 treatise on food adulteration after buyers were effectively eating verdigris. Recipes like this one, which coax the colour out with nothing but repeated heat, are the respectable descendants of that scandal. The closing note that the leftover vinegar is good for salads reflects a kitchen where nothing acidic and well spiced was ever poured away.