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Shallots, Pickled
Take as much vinegar as will be required to cover the shallots, and boil it with spices in the following proportions. To each quart of vinegar put a small blade of mace, two cloves, four allspice, two grains of cayenne, a salt-spoonful of black peppercorns, and a tea-spoonful of salt. Strain it, and let it get cold. Divide and skin the shallots; put them into perfectly dry and sound pickling-jars, and intersperse amongst them the spices taken from the vinegar. Pour the vinegar over them, and let them be entirely covered with it. Store for use. The pickle may be used in two months. Time to boil the vinegar and spices, three minutes.
A cold-poured vinegar pickle of the plainest sort: the only cooking is a three-minute infusion of the spice vinegar. The proportions are all given per quart, so scale to whatever your jars hold.
- The hinge: pour the vinegar coldBoiling vinegar poured over raw shallots softens them; cooling it first is what keeps them hard and snapping after two months. The three-minute boil is only to draw out the spices.
- Use vinegar at 5 per cent acidity, undilutedAny standard malt, cider or white wine vinegar labelled 5% will do. Do not cut it with water, and do not substitute a low-acid "drinking" vinegar or a homemade one of unknown strength, since the acid is the entire preservative here.
- Archaic measuresA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon. "Two grains of cayenne" may be the apothecaries' grain (which would make it about a tenth of a gram) or simply two specks; either way it amounts to the smallest pinch you can pick up. A blade of mace is one strip of the dried aril, not a whole nutmeg's worth of ground mace, though about a quarter teaspoon ground is a fair stand-in.
- "Divide and skin"Break the shallot heads into their separate cloves and peel each one, leaving the root end trimmed but intact so they do not fall apart. Peel them dry; soaking waterlogs them.
- Dry and sound jarsThe Victorian instruction is doing real work. Wash the jars in hot soapy water, dry them in a low oven, and make sure the lids are not bare metal, which vinegar corrodes. Any water left in the jar dilutes the pickle at the point where it matters most.
- Keep them submergedShallots float. Top up so the vinegar is a good half-inch above the topmost clove and press them down with a small round of baking parchment or a glass weight; anything above the liquid line will discolour and spoil.
- Storage, in modern termsA Victorian larder was cool and dark year round. Lacking one, store the sealed jars in the refrigerator, where they will keep the full two-month cure and well beyond. There is no heat processing in this recipe, so it is not a shelf-stable canned product by current standards.
- YieldA quart of spiced vinegar will cover roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of peeled shallots packed close, but allow jar capacity well above a quart, since the shallots displace their own volume.
Cassell's places this among the plain vinegar pickles that were a fixture of the English store cupboard, made in autumn when onions and shallots were lifted and eaten through the winter with cold meat, cheese and bread. The spice list here is the standard nineteenth-century pickling quartet of mace, cloves, allspice and peppercorns, with cayenne for heat, and a similar infusion is often said to have served for onions, gherkins and walnuts, which may be why a dictionary of cookery could set it out once by the quart and let the cook scale it. The shallot's name comes through Old French from Ascalon, the Levantine port, a derivation generally traced back to Latin cepa ascalonia; shallots were reckoned by some to suit pickling because the small firm cloves stay crisp in acid rather than going slack.