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Pickled Blackberries
Allow three tablespoons fruit vinegar to each quart of berries; also one cup of sugar. Boil with the sugar and vinegar a half-teaspoon each of cassia buds, mace and cloves (in bags). Add berries and cook slowly twenty minutes. Seal while hot.
A sweet-sour spiced fruit pickle of the sort served alongside cold meats and game rather than eaten as a dessert compote. The proportions are workable as written; the sealing method is the part that needs rethinking.
- Sealing while hotOpen-kettle sealing — filling jars with hot fruit and letting the cooling lid pull a vacuum — is no longer accepted practice, because the outside of the food and the jar rim are never held at a temperature that kills surface mould and yeast. Blackberries and vinegar make a high-acid product, so the useful modern route is either a short boiling-water bath following a current tested procedure, or simply treating the jars as a refrigerator pickle and using them within a month.
- Fruit vinegarThis means a berry-infused vinegar; raspberry vinegar was the commonest of them in this period, sold bottled or made at home by steeping fruit in cider vinegar. Plain cider vinegar is a reasonable stand-in.
- Cassia budsThe unopened flower buds of the cassia tree, once a common pickling spice and still sold by spice merchants. They taste like mild cinnamon with a floral edge; a short length of cinnamon stick is the nearest substitute, though the flavour is heavier.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground. Half a teaspoon is a modest quantity — use blades if you have them, since ground mace will cloud the syrup and can escape a loosely woven bag.
- The spice bagsTie each spice separately or all together in a scrap of muslin so they can be lifted out. Loose cloves in particular will keep strengthening in the jar and eventually dominate everything.
- QuantitiesA quart of blackberries is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, or about four to four and a half cups. Three tablespoons of vinegar to that much fruit, against a full cup of sugar, is a light hand — this is a sweet pickle, not a sharp one.
- The twenty minutesSlow cooking for that long is deliberate: the berries collapse and the syrup thickens. Keep it at a bare simmer, since a hard boil will break the fruit into jam and drive off the spice aromatics.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly a pint or so from a quart of berries. Serve cold with roast pork, ham, duck or cold mutton, in the same role as cranberry sauce or chutney.
Spiced sweet-sour fruits were a fixture of American and British preserving well before the nineteenth century, and by the late Victorian period household manuals commonly carried a run of them — pickled peaches, pickled pears, spiced currants, spiced grapes — the same syrup of sugar, vinegar and whole spice poured over whatever the season gave. Blackberries were among the cheapest fruits a household could put up, wild-gathered as well as bought, and they appear in books of this kind under both preserves and pickles. Fruit vinegars such as raspberry vinegar were themselves a domestic staple, drunk diluted as a summer cooling drink and kept on hand for exactly this sort of use.