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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Cucumbers
A small quantity can be freshened from time to time and freshly pickled as required for use. But this method of laying down pickles is not the one commonly preferred. - To Freshen Cucumbers. After cucumbers have been steeped in brine until they are entirely yellow, and about three days before they are to be done up, lift them carefully from the brine into a clean vessel, cover them with clean cold water and let stand three or four days, changing the water each day or oftener to freshen them.
To Pickle Cucumbers.-Pack the freshened cucumbers in wide-mouthed bottles or jars and pour over them either pure vinegar boiling hot or any desired pickle of spiced vinegar and seal.
Or first pour over them pure vinegar scalding hot and let stand in a warm place until they become green.
Every two or three days pour off the vinegar, reheat it and again pour it over the cucumbers scalding hot; when the color is satisfactory pour off the pure vinegar and cover them with the spiced pickle if desired. But while the above is recommended as a thorough method designed to prepare a high-grade quality of pickles, recommendations of authorities differ very widely and good practice doubtless varies equally as much or more. One authority recommends merely washing cucumbers in salt and water, and immediately bottling and covering them with boiling hot pickle. Another, scalding fresh-picked cucumbers with boiling brine, and when cold draining and at once covering them with boiling vinegar. Another would cover fresh-picked cucumbers at once with boiling vinegar containing a handful of salt, reheating the vinegar every two or three days until they become green, then pickling and sealing. Hence it may be inferred that preserving in brine before pickling is not necesssary, but we prefer to recommend it for reasons already stated.
Authorities also differ as to whether the brine should be cold or heated, and the length of time the cucumbers should be immersed in brine, and also as to whether it is sufficient to cover the cucumbers with scalding vinegar and immediately seal, or preferable to let them stand, reheating the vinegar occasionally to green them. All of these questions must be decided by each person for himself according to the grade of pickles desired, and his willingness to take the necessary pains. In general, it is believed that the slower and more painstaking the process, the better will be the quality of the product.
Utensils for Pickling. It was formerly customary to make pickles in kettles of brass or bell metal in order to give them a bright green color, and also to add more or less alum for the same purpose. But the action of the acetic acid contained in vinegar upon brass and similar metals is to produce a poisonous compound, especially if the pickles are allowed to stand in them until they become cold.
The use of alum is also injurious, and for the same reason cheap earthenware, which is frequently glazed with lead, should not be employed.
This is a survey of competing 1900s practice rather than a tested procedure, and it is unsafe to follow today: nothing in it is measured. The notes below explain where it fails; for cucumber pickles, use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority.
- No brine strength givenCucumbers are steeped "until they are entirely yellow" in a brine of unstated concentration. Long salt-brining is a real fermentation, and its safety depends entirely on holding salt above roughly the level that suppresses spoilage organisms while permitting lactic acid bacteria. A brine guessed by eye can sit below that line for weeks.
- No acidity controlThe finished pickle is "pure vinegar" of unspecified strength. Household and farm vinegars of the period varied widely in strength and could fall well below the 5 percent acetic acid that modern pickling depends on. Without a known acidity, and with waterlogged desalted cucumbers diluting it further, there is no assurance the jar reaches the pH that makes a shelf-stable pickle safe.
- Hot-fill and seal is not processingPouring scalding vinegar over raw cucumbers and sealing does not heat the interior of the jar to any controlled temperature. Contemporary practice is a measured boiling-water process on a known-acid product; nothing here corresponds to it.
- The greening is the point of failureThe whole "reheat until they become green" routine is chasing a colour that raw cucumbers lose when cooked. Historically that green came from copper. The author knows this and warns against brass and bell metal, but the instruction to keep reheating vinegar on the cucumbers is the residue of the copper method with the copper removed.
- Alum and lead glazeThe closing paragraph is right on both counts. Alum was used as a crisping and greening agent and is not something to add to food; cheap earthenware of the period was frequently lead-glazed, and acetic acid leaches lead readily. Neither has any place in a modern crock.
- "A handful of salt"One of the cited authorities calls for a handful of salt in the vinegar. That is not convertible to a figure with any confidence, and it is exactly the kind of measurement that makes the procedure unrepeatable.
- No yield, no timeline, no storageNo yield, no storage guidance -- The text gives no quantity of cucumbers and no jar size, and although it supplies intervals for freshening and reheating, it says nothing about how long the sealed jars keep or how they should be stored.
Household Discoveries belongs to the encyclopaedic self-help shelf of the early 1900s, and this entry shows the genre at its most characteristic: rather than give one method, the compiler lines up three further authorities against its own recommendation, notes that "recommendations of authorities differ very widely," and leaves the reader to choose. Behind the argument lies a long quarrel about green pickles. Cucumbers brined and then boiled turn a dull olive, and for generations the bright green of a commercial pickle was got by cooking them in brass or copper vessels, or with added alum and copper salts. Fredrick Accum's Treatise on Adulterations of Food of 1820 made copper-greened pickles one of its notorious examples, and the objection was still being restated eighty years later, as it is in the final paragraph here. That this book takes the trouble to warn against brass kettles, alum and lead-glazed crockery places it squarely in the pure-food agitation that produced the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 -- an era confident about naming poisons but with no way, in a home kitchen, to measure the acidity or salt concentration that actually determines whether a pickle is safe.