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Mixed Sweet Pickles
Put in small agate or enamel saucepan 1 cup vinegar 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon peppercorns 1/4 teaspoon blades of mace 1/4 teaspoon whole cloves, and cook 2 minutes. Add 1/2 cup candied cherries, cook 5 minutes; skim out, add 1/2 cup large Malaga raisins in clusters of two or three. Cook 10 minutes, remove raisins and add 18 small sweet cucumber pickles and cook 10 minutes. Arrange in glass jar in closely packed layers, putting raisins in first, then cherries, then pickles; repeat until jar is full. Strain hot syrup into jar, and seal.
A quick sweet pickle built in a saucepan rather than a canner, meant to be packed decoratively and served as a relish alongside cold meats. The syrup is short and strong, so the timings matter more than the quantities.
- Agate or enamel means non-reactiveAgateware was speckled enamel over a steel base, and enamelled and agate pans were the usual recommendation for acid cooking of this kind. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron; bare aluminium, cast iron or copper will react with the vinegar and taint the syrup.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg, sold whole as brittle orange "blades." Ground mace is not a good substitute here because it will cloud the syrup; if that is all you have, tie it in cheesecloth.
- Malaga raisinsLarge muscat raisins from Málaga, once sold still attached to the stem in clusters, which is why the recipe speaks of "clusters of two or three." Any large muscat or jumbo flame raisin works; the point is fruit big enough to hold its shape through ten minutes of simmering.
- Small sweet cucumber picklesThese are already-pickled gherkins from a jar, not fresh cucumbers. The recipe is re-pickling them in a spiced sweet syrup, so buy the smallest whole sweet pickles you can find and drain them well.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar in the 1920s was generally around 4 to 5 percent acetic acid, close to what is sold now. Use cider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent; anything labeled for cleaning is far too strong.
- Cook each fruit separately, then layerThe staggered cooking is the whole method. Cherries go in only 5 minutes so they do not dissolve; raisins get 10 minutes to plump, and the pickles the same 10 minutes at the end. Skimming each out before the next goes in also keeps the syrup clear enough to look good through glass.
- Sealing and storageThis is open-kettle sealing, a practice modern canning guidance has abandoned, and the recipe gives no processing time. Treat the result as a refrigerator pickle: cool it, cap it, keep it cold, and eat it within a month.
Alice Bradley, who ran Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston after Fannie Farmer's death, wrote For Luncheon and Supper Guests for hostesses working without much help and with limited time. A sweet pickle like this is characteristic of the book's logic: it is not preserving in the agricultural sense, since the cucumbers arrive already pickled and the cherries already candied, but an assembly job that turns three shop-bought items into something that looks deliberate in a glass jar on the table. Sweet spiced pickles of this kind, heavy on cloves, mace and sugar, descend from the English tradition of sweet-sour fruit pickles served with cold meat, and they held their place on American luncheon menus well into the middle of the twentieth century before the relish tray went out of fashion. The instruction to arrange the layers in a clear jar is a reminder that on a supper table of this period the pickle was expected to be looked at as much as eaten.