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Pickles, Summer, for Present Use
Cut equal quantities of young onions, sour apples, and fresh cucumbers into thin slices. With these fill an unglazed earthen jar which will hold a quart of liquid. Shake in with the vegetables a dessert-spoonful of salt and a tea-spoonful and a half of cayenne. Pour in four table-spoonfuls of sherry and four table-spoonfuls of soy, and as much vinegar as the jar will hold, and cover closely until wanted. If it is wished to make this pickle in the autumn or winter, finely-minced celery may be substituted for the cucumbers. The pickle can be used the day it is made.
A quick vinegar pickle rather than a keeping one — the whole point is that it is edible within hours. Treat it as a fresh condiment with a short life, not a preserve.
- The jarUse a glass jar or a modern food-safe ceramic one. Old earthenware is a poor choice for anything this acidic: where such a jar is glazed, vinegar can draw metals out of the glaze, and unglazed earthenware is porous and hard to clean.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons; a tablespoonful in Cassell's is close enough to the modern 15 ml. So: 2 tsp salt, 1 1/2 tsp cayenne, 4 tbsp each sherry and soy.
- CayenneA tea-spoonful and a half in a quart jar is genuinely hot, and nineteenth-century cayenne was sometimes adulterated, so its strength is not a reliable guide to modern powder. Start with half a teaspoon and add more on tasting.
- "Soy"This means bottled soy sauce, then a standard grocer's item alongside ketchup and Worcestershire. A Chinese light soy or a Japanese shoyu gives the right salty thinness; dark soy will muddy the colour.
- Sour applesA firm, tart cooking apple — Bramley, Granny Smith. Sweet dessert apples turn woolly and throw the balance off against the vinegar.
- VinegarAny 5% malt, cider or white wine vinegar. Malt is the period-correct choice and stands up best to the soy.
- StorageDespite "cover closely until wanted," keep it in the refrigerator and eat it within a week. There is no heat processing, no seal and no measured acidity here, so it is not a shelf-stable pickle.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, served in spoonfuls alongside cold meat, curry, chops or cheese. Slice everything thin, on a mandoline if you have one, so the vinegar penetrates the same day.
Cassell's calls this a pickle "for present use" to distinguish it from the keeping pickles that fill most of the chapter — typically, as the recipes suggest, spiced and set aside for long storage. Quick pickles like this are usually associated with the summer table, made from whatever the kitchen garden was producing in quantity, and the addition of sherry and bottled soy suggests a well-stocked Victorian store cupboard, where imported soy had been a familiar grocer's sauce since the eighteenth century. The onion-apple-cucumber combination with cayenne and soy sits somewhere near the Anglo-Indian family of chow-chow and related relishes, which the same books treat as everyday accompaniments to cold joints and curries. The suggested winter swap of minced celery for cucumber is a reminder of how sharply seasonal produce still was, while celery kept well in a cool cellar.