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Cucumber Pickles
Nine green cucumbers and 4 onions chopped finely. Let stand 3 hours in brine. Drain cucumber out of brine, add the following dressing and boil 2 or 3 minutes.
This entry is a fragment. The dressing it depends on was never printed alongside it, and the quantities that would make it safe to keep are absent throughout.
- The dressing is missingEverything that turns chopped cucumber and onion into a pickle -- the vinegar, sugar, mustard, turmeric or flour -- sits in a "following dressing" that does not appear on the page. Without it there is no way to know the acidity of the finished jar, which is the only thing keeping a preserved vegetable safe.
- Brine strength unstated"Let stand 3 hours in brine" gives neither salt weight nor water volume. A three-hour soak is a drawing-out step, not a cure; it removes water from the cucumber so the pickle is not watery, and contributes essentially nothing to preservation.
- Two or three minutes is not processingA brief boil cooks the dressing and heats the vegetables. It is not a canning process. Nothing here specifies jars, headspace, a boiling-water bath or a processing time, so this cannot be treated as shelf-stable.
- Nine cucumbers is not a measurementCucumber size varies enormously, and a large modern cucumber can weigh several times what a small garden one does. Even if the dressing were recovered, the ratio of vegetable to vinegar would be guesswork.
- Low-acid aromaticsLow-acid vegetables -- Both cucumber and onion are low-acid, and neither is weighed here. A pickle of this kind needs a measured vinegar quantity to stay in a safe pH range.
- What to do insteadUse a current tested recipe for mustard pickle or chow-chow, where vinegar strength and processing time are specified. This page is worth reading as a record of how such a pickle was assembled, not as instructions.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and much of its content was gathered from Canadian housewives who wrote in with their own household standbys. That origin may well explain what happened here: a recipe that assumed a dressing given elsewhere -- or simply known to everyone in the writer's kitchen -- could easily go to press without it. Chopped cucumber-and-onion pickles of this kind belong to the late-summer glut tradition, made in quantity when the garden came in all at once and eaten through the winter with cold meat. The three-hour salting is a long-established part of the method, a step European and North American cooks alike used to firm cut vegetables before they met vinegar.