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Onions, Spanish, and Beetroot to Pickle
Take equal quantities of Spanish onions and beetroot. Slice the onions, and lay them in brine for twenty-four hours, then drain them well. Wash the beetroots gently; if the skin or fibres are broken the colour will be spoilt. Boil them for an hour, and leave them also until the next day. Peel the roots, and cut them into slices. Place alternate layers of beetroot and onion in wide-mouthed earthen jars, pour over them vinegar which has been boiled with spices and allowed to cool. Cover with bladder, and store for use. Two or three drops of cochineal will improve the colour of this pickle, and will not harm it. Beetroot, time to boil, one hour.
A Victorian shelf pickle of the kind meant to sit in a cold larder for months. The method is sound in outline, but as written it gives no acid strength, no salt ratio and no seal, and those are precisely the numbers that decide whether a jar of low-acid root vegetables is safe.
- No measured acidityBeetroot and onion are both low-acid vegetables, and the safety of the pickle rests entirely on the vinegar being strong enough to bring the whole jar below pH 4.6. The recipe specifies neither the strength of the vinegar nor the volume relative to the vegetables, and boiling vinegar with spices drives off some acetic acid. There is no way to know from the text whether the finished jar is acidic enough.
- No measured brine"Lay them in brine for twenty-four hours" assumes the reader keeps a standing salt brine of known strength, which almost no modern kitchen does. The salt draws water out of the onion; if it is weak, that water dilutes the vinegar further once the slices are packed.
- Ambient storage under a bladderA bladder tied over the mouth of a crock was a common closure of the period. It excludes flies and slows evaporation but is not an airtight, sterile seal, and nothing here is heat-processed in the jar. Low-acid vegetables kept at room temperature with insufficient acid are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum; the toxin gives no smell, taste or gas you can rely on.
- The one-hour boil is not a safety stepThe beetroot is boiled a day ahead purely to cook it and set the colour, then cooled and packed cold with cool vinegar. Nothing in the finished jar is ever brought to a preserving temperature, so the process depends wholly on acidity that the recipe does not quantify.
- CochinealThe colouring is the least of the problems. Cochineal is carmine, made from the dried insect Dactylopius coccus, still a legal food colour today, though it is a known allergen for a small number of people and rules out the dish for vegans.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength of at least 5 per cent acetic acid, a weighed salt ratio and a specified processing or refrigeration regime. Beetroot and onion pickles are well covered by modern preserving guides.
Cassell's is writing at the height of the English pickle jar, when a larder might well hold a row of earthenware crocks under bladder covers and vinegar was the household's chief preservative after salt. The Spanish onion — large, pale and mild — was prized for exactly this use, since it slices into broad rings that stay firm and do not overpower. The instruction to wash the beetroot gently and boil it unpeeled is the genuinely useful piece of craft here: cut the skin or tear the trailing root and the betanin pigment bleeds into the water, leaving pale roots and a muddy pickle. That the book still suggests reinforcing the colour with cochineal says something about Victorian expectations of the pickle jar, which was as much a decorative object on the table as a relish, and about a period when adding colouring to preserves at home was unremarkable rather than suspect.