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To pickle in brine
A good brine is made of bay salt and water, thoroughly saturated, so that some of the salt remains undissolved; into this brine the substance to be preserved is plunged, and kept covered with it. Among vegetables, French beans, artichokes, olives, and the different sorts of samphire, may be thus preserved, and among animals, herrings.
A one-paragraph statement of the oldest preserving method in the book: a saturated salt solution and total immersion. The vocabulary needs translating, and the fish instruction cannot stand.
- Why the caution is hereThe recipe gives no salt weight, no temperature, no duration and no storage conditions for the herrings. Salt-cured fish held warm or under-salted is the classic vehicle for Clostridium botulinum type E, which produces toxin without spoiling the fish noticeably, and for Listeria. Curing fish safely depends on measured salt-to-water ratios, controlled cold temperatures and a defined cure time; use a current, tested recipe rather than this one.
- Bay saltCoarse, grey, unrefined sea salt from solar evaporation ponds — the standard cheap preserving salt of the period, bought in bulk rather than in small quantities. It carried impurities, chiefly magnesium and calcium salts, which distinguished it from refined table salt.
- "Thoroughly saturated"At room temperature water will hold roughly 360 g of salt per litre, about 26 percent by weight. The undissolved residue at the bottom presumably serves as a reserve, keeping the brine at saturation as juices are drawn out of the vegetables.
- SamphireTwo unrelated plants went by the name. Marsh samphire is Salicornia, the jointed green succulent of tidal mudflats now sold as sea asparagus; rock samphire is Crithmum maritimum, an aromatic cliff plant with a resinous, carroty flavour. Both were pickled; the second is much the stronger.
- French beans and artichokesFrench beans are ordinary green beans, kept whole and young. "Artichokes" here most likely means globe artichoke hearts, trimmed of choke and outer leaves, though the text does not specify.
- OlivesRaw olives are inedibly bitter from oleuropein, and plain saturated brine removes it only over many months of repeated changes. Commercial curing today uses either a long fermentation in weaker brine or a lye treatment; a single saturated brine will preserve the fruit long before it makes it palatable.
- Getting the salt back outAnything held in 26 percent brine is not food until it has been freshened — soaked in several changes of cold water, then usually blanched. The recipe does not mention this step.
- Vessel and coverageUse glass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic; saturated brine attacks bare metal and unglazed earthenware. Whatever is submerged must stay submerged, so a weight or a follower plate is needed — anything that floats into the air gap will spoil.
Brining is the plainest form of preservation there is, and this entry reads less like a recipe than a note of first principles: salt to refusal, then immerse. Before mechanical refrigeration it underpinned both the domestic larder and international trade — the barrelled herring of the North Sea fishery, salted at sea and shipped inland across Europe, was for centuries one of the most important preserved foods in the northern world, and the Dutch built much of their early commercial wealth on it. Bay salt features because it was among the cheapest grades available, and in Britain salt carried a heavy excise duty until its repeal in 1825, which made the choice of salt a matter of household economy as much as of flavour.