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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Boil
Or to every 2 quarts of vinegar add ounce of mace, 1 ounce of ginger sliced, 1 dozen cloves, 1 ounce of black pepper, 1 handful of salt. Boil all together for not more than five minutes, and pour over the pickles scalding hot.
Or add to the above if desired 3 or 4 cloves of garlic and shallots.
Or to 3 quarts of pure white-wine or other strong vinegar add 2 ounces of ginger, ounce of mace, pound of salt, tablespoonful of Cayenne pepper, 1 ounce of white or black pepper unground, 1 ounce of mustard seed, 4 ounces of shallots. Boil together not more than five minutes and pour over cucumbers and other hard, firm vegetables scalding hot, or over small and delicate vegetables cold.
Or crush together in a mortar 4 ounces of unground black pepper, 2 ounces of ginger root, 1 ounce of allspice and 4 ounces of salt. Cayenne, paprika, or garlic may be added in small quantities if desired. Place a quart of vinegar in an enameled saucepan, and bring to a boil. Stir in these spices. Let boil not more than five minutes and pour over the pickles scalding hot for cucumbers, walnuts, and the like, or cold for cabbage or fancy mixed pickles. Or place these spices in a glass bottle or stone jar, cover with a quart of green vinegar, seal and let stand in a warm place three or four days, shaking frequently. Pour over the pickles either hot or cold.
Or to 1 gallon of vinegar add 6 ounces of salt, 1 ounce of spice, 1 ounce of mustard, ounce of mace, ounce of cloves, ounce of nutmeg, 2 ounces of sliced horse-radish. Bruise these spices in water, mix, cover with 1 cold water and boil not over five minutes. Pour over the pickles hot or cold, and if desired, after letting them stand twenty-four hours, place the whole in a porcelain saucepan and simmer until the color is satisfactory.
Bottle and seal.
Or to every 2 quarts of vinegar add 1 teaspoonful of black pepper, 1 teaspoonful of mace, ½ cupful of sugar. Let the mixture boil up not to exceed five minutes. They may be bottled hot or cold and will be at once ready for use.
Or heat the vinegar and pour it boiling hot over the pickles.
Or place in a porcelain kettle 100 small cucumbers previously soaked in brine and freshened, cover with vinegar, add a handful of pepper corns, a handful of horse-radish, 1 ounce of cloves, 1 ounce of white mustard seed, a small quantity of Cayenne or paprika, and let the whole boil not to exceed five minutes.
Or heat the vinegar and spice and pour it hot over the pickles. The addition of horse-radish helps to keep the pickles sweet and sound. Oldtime housewives used often to add to the pickles a little dill from the herb bed.
Or to each gallon of vinegar add 1 pound of good quality brown sugar, 1 tablespoonful of olive oil, 1 tablespoonful of mustard seed, 1 tablespoonful of green pepper pods, 2 ounces of horse-radish, ounce of cloves, ounce of mace, 1 ounce of ginger, 1 ounce of allspice.
This is not one recipe but a string of alternative spiced-vinegar formulas of the kind that filled the pickling chapter of a turn-of-the-century household manual. As printed here it cannot be followed safely, for reasons that have as much to do with the text as with the method.
- The fractions are missingRepeated phrases like "ounce of mace", "pound of salt" and "ounce of cloves" have lost their leading fractions in reproduction, and "cover with 1 cold water" is missing its unit entirely. Several of these formulas therefore have no recoverable proportions at all, and guessing at a half or a quarter changes both the salt and the dilution substantially.
- Vinegar strength is never statedThe safety of a vinegar pickle rests entirely on the acidity of the finished brine, and these instructions call variously for "pure white-wine or other strong vinegar" and for "green vinegar" — young, unfinished, and of unknown acid content. Without a known percentage, and with water added in one version, there is no way to know whether the pickle lands in a safe range.
- Cold-filled and sealedSeveral variants direct the spiced vinegar to be poured over cabbage, mixed pickles or "small and delicate vegetables" cold, and the text elsewhere says to bottle and seal, or that the pickles "may be bottled hot or cold", with no heat treatment of any kind. A sealed, low-oxygen jar of vegetables of uncertain acidity is a condition under which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin, and the toxin is undetectable by smell or taste.
- "Bottle and seal" is not a processNowhere is there a jar type, a headspace, a processing time or a storage temperature. The text mentions only a "glass bottle or stone jar"; pickles of this period were commonly kept in crocks or bottles in a cool larder, and the same liquor in a modern sealed jar on a warm pantry shelf is a different proposition.
- The brine step is undefinedThe hundred small cucumbers are "previously soaked in brine and freshened" — a whole curing stage with no salt ratio, no duration and no temperature. That stage governs how much salt and how much water end up in the finished pickle.
- The five-minute ruleThe insistence on boiling no more than five minutes is sound old craft and worth understanding: prolonged boiling drives off acetic acid and can turn the volatile spice oils bitter and flat. Modern practice likewise keeps the boil short, but that does nothing to make the rest of the method safe.
- If you want to pickleUse a current tested recipe that specifies vinegar of at least five per cent acidity, a measured ratio of vinegar to water, and a processing time. The spice combinations above — mace, ginger, allspice, mustard seed, shallot, horseradish — are historically interesting reading in their own right.
Spiced vinegar was the backbone of English and American pickling for centuries, and a book like this one prints half a dozen versions in a row because there was no single agreed formula. The spice list reflects the colonial trade: mace and nutmeg from the East Indies, black pepper and ginger, cloves and allspice, all of them cheap enough by this date to be measured out by the ounce into a gallon of vinegar. Horseradish appears in three of these formulas, and the text gives the reason -- it was believed to keep pickles "sweet and sound." Horseradish does contain antimicrobial compounds, though the belief long predates any account of why it might work. The passing note that "oldtime housewives used often to add to the pickles a little dill from the herb bed" suggests dill was, on this page at least, an optional addition rather than the defining flavour it became in the later American dill pickle. What the page cannot tell you is how strong any of this vinegar was; before standardised commercial acidity, a cook judged her vinegar by taste and by how her last batch had kept.