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REMOULADE OF CUCUMBERS (an excellent pickle)
Divide the cucumbers into quarters, take off the rind, and remove the seeds. Cut the sections into pieces about an inch and a half long, put them into a large earthen pan, and sprinkle an ounce of salt over each pound of cucumbers. Let them soak for four hours, drain on a sieve until all the moisture has run away from them, then dry them in the sun for one hour. Make as much remoulade as will be required to bind the pieces of cucumber together, in the following manner. Take a handful each of tarragon, burnet, chives, and chervil. Throw them into boiling water for a minute, and afterwards squeeze them well in a cloth to free them from moisture. Put them into a mortar with the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs, four filleted anchovies, a table-spoonful of capers, and a table-spoonful of unmixed mustard. Pound these ingredients until they form a smooth paste and are thoroughly blended, then beat them up with the yolks of three raw eggs. Add very gradually, first by drops and then by tea-spoonfuls, half a pint of best olive oil, and afterwards about three table-spoonfuls of either tarragon or chilli vinegar, beating the sauce well between every addition. Rub it through a fine sieve, stir the cucumbers into it, and put the pickle into small bottles. Cover the mouths of the bottles with bladder, and store in a very cool, airy place. Time to prepare, six hours. Probable cost of cucumbers, 6d. each, when in full season.
This is a raw-egg sauce bottled and stored at ambient temperature, and that is why it cannot be made as written. The notes below explain the failure and translate the vocabulary for readers working through the text.
- Raw yolks held at room temperatureThree raw egg yolks are emulsified into oil and then bottled and stored for keeping, with no cooking step at any point. A shell-egg emulsion held for days or weeks outside refrigeration is a growth medium for Salmonella; nothing in the recipe brings it to a temperature that would control it.
- Not enough acid to preserveThree tablespoons of vinegar against half a pint of oil, four cooked yolks, anchovies and an unstated quantity of salted cucumber does not produce a measured, uniformly acidified product. There is no way to know the finished pH, and this is the difference between a pickle and a room-temperature culture.
- Low-acid vegetables under oilCucumber suspended in an oil-based sauce in a sealed bottle creates the oxygen-poor, low-acid conditions associated with Clostridium botulinum. Herb-and-vegetable-in-oil preparations are exactly the category that modern food-safety guidance restricts to refrigerated, short-term use or to commercially acidified production.
- The bladder sealCovering a bottle mouth with a piece of dried bladder tied down was the standard Victorian closure, and it is neither sterile nor hermetic. It excludes flies and slows evaporation; it does nothing that a modern canning process does. If you want a keeping cucumber pickle, use a current tested recipe with weighed vinegar and a measured processing time.
- Salting and sun-dryingAn ounce of salt per pound of cucumber for four hours draws out water so the flesh stays firm; the subsequent hour in the sun is a further drying step, not a curing one. Neither reduces the risk described above.
- The herbsBurnet (salad burnet, Sanguisorba minor) is the one that has largely dropped out of shops; it tastes faintly of cucumber, which is the point of its inclusion here. Tarragon, chives and chervil are three of the four herbs French cookery calls fines herbes; the fourth is parsley, not burnet.
- "Unmixed mustard"Dry mustard powder, not the wet condiment. It goes into the mortar as a powder and takes up moisture from the pounded yolks and anchovy.
- Units and moneyHalf a pint of oil is 10 fl oz imperial, a little under a cup and a quarter. A gill, where Cassell's uses it elsewhere, is a quarter-pint. "6d. each" is sixpence, the figure the recipe gives for cucumbers in full season.
Rémoulade in nineteenth-century English cookery books means much what it still means in France: a cold sauce built on mustard, anchovy, capers and chopped green herbs, generally traced to the eighteenth-century French kitchen and usually thickened either with pounded hard-boiled yolk or, as here, with a mayonnaise-style emulsion of raw yolk and oil. This version is offered as a pickle rather than a sauce. Tightly stoppered jars of cucumber, walnut, mushroom and samphire were part of the standing store cupboard, kept in a cool larder and drawn on through the winter to relieve a diet heavy on plain roast and boiled meat. The instruction to seal with bladder belongs to the era before the screw-top glass jar and the domestic pressure canner made the arithmetic of preserving something that could actually be measured.