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Spanish Onions, to Pickle
Choose moderate-sized and perfectly sound Spanish onions. Skin them, and cut them into thin slices, put them in layers into wide-mouthed bottles, and sprinkle upon each layer a little salt and cayenne. When the jar is almost full, pour cold vinegar into it to cover the onions, tie bladder over the mouth of the bottles, and store the pickle in a cool, dry place. If liked, the jar may be filled with alternate layers of sliced onion and sliced boiled beetroot, and then three or four drops of cochineal may be added to the vinegar, to improve the look of the pickle. For another mode of pickling Spanish onions, see ONIONS, SPANISH, PICKLED. Time, the pickle may be used in three or four weeks. Probable cost, onions, 1d. or 1 1/2d. each.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle of the simplest Victorian kind: no brining, no boiling, just salt, cayenne and vinegar poured over raw slices. A few of its assumptions need updating before you start.
- Use vinegar of known strengthThe single thing that makes this pickle keep is acidity, and the original never states it. Use a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acetic acid (most malt, cider and distilled white vinegars are); anything weaker, or vinegar diluted with water, will not hold raw onion safely at room temperature.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleNothing here is heat-processed, and the jars are only covered, not sealed. Keep the filled jars in the fridge rather than the Victorian cool larder, and use them within two or three months.
- BladderPig's or ox bladder was tied on wet over the jar mouth and shrank tight as it dried, giving a close-fitting cover. A plastic-lined screw lid does the job now. Avoid bare metal lids, which corrode where vinegar vapour touches them and taint the pickle.
- Spanish onionsIn British usage this means the large, mild, straw-skinned type; the name came from onions imported from Spain rather than from one named cultivar. Any large sweet onion works; two good-sized ones should roughly fill a litre jar when sliced.
- Salt and cayenneNo quantities are given because the sprinkling was judged by eye. About a teaspoon of salt and a small pinch of cayenne per layer is in keeping; use pure salt without anti-caking agents, which cloud the vinegar.
- CochinealSold in Victorian kitchens as a liquid colouring made from dried scale insects. It is still available as carmine, but the beetroot layers already colour the vinegar a strong pink, and the drops can simply be left out.
- Beetroot versionBoiled beetroot sliced in with the onion softens fast in vinegar and bleeds heavily. Slice it thicker than the onion and expect the jar to colour deeply within a day or so.
- Timing and yieldThe recipe's three to four weeks is about right for the onion to lose its raw bite; the slices stay reasonably crisp for some weeks after that, then slacken. A 1-litre jar will give perhaps a dozen servings alongside cold meat or cheese.
Cassell's carried more than one entry on pickled onions -- this recipe cross-refers to another -- because pickle was a fixture of the Victorian cold table, eaten with bread and cheese, cold joints and the ubiquitous chop-house lunch. Spanish onions were prized for being large and mild enough to eat raw, and slicing them meant the pickle was ready in weeks rather than months. The cochineal instruction is characteristic of the period's frank interest in appearance; so is the price note, since Cassell's addressed a middle-class housekeeper expected to know what an onion should cost her. The bladder cover, meanwhile, belongs to a kitchen with no rubber rings and no reliable screw-top jars, where a wet membrane tied down and left to shrink was a common seal for anything meant to keep.