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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Hence
Many people have a prejudice against deep green pickles found on the market, on account of the fear that poisonous substances may have been used in the manufacture. Hence homemade pickles of a good color and flavor usually find a ready and profitable local market.
To Test Pickles for Copper.-To find out if pickles are poisonous from having been cooked in brass or copper kettles, chop a sample of the pickle fine, place it in a glass bottle with a few drams of liquid ammonia diluted with about half as much water.
Shake thoroughly, and if there are any traces of copper in the pickles the contents will be of a deep blue color.
Vinegar for Pickles. - White-wine or sugar vinegar is perhaps the most VINEGAR, PICKLES, AND PICKLING suitable for a fine grade of pickles.
But any good quality of vinegar that is fully ripened and has been previously clarified may be used. The vinegar should be boiled and freed from mother or sediment that would cause the pickles to ferment.
To Clarify Vinegar. - Throw an ounce or so of shredded isinglass into each gallon of vinegar and let stand a few days to clear. Strain through cheese cloth.
To Keep Vinegar Free from Mold. -Lay a small bag of thin muslin containing mustard on top of the pickles. If the vinegar has been properly boiled and clarified, it will tend to prevent the formation of mold.
To Strengthen Weak Vinegar.- Pour it off the pickles, bring it to a boil, pour it back over them and add about ¼ teaspoonful of alum and spread over the top layer a piece of brown paper soaked in New Orleans molasses.
Or boil down the vinegar with very gentle heat so as to allow it to lose its surplus water by evaporation.
Or allow it to freeze, and remove the ice before it melts. Acetic acid does not readily freeze. Hence the quantity of acid in proportion to the bulk of water becomes greater.
Spiced Pickle. -The following recipes are recommended for pickling liquids for cucumbers and other vegetables, mixed pickles, etc., including mushrooms, onions, walnuts, cucumbers, cauliflowers, samphires, green gooseberries, barberries, radish pods, melons, French beans, tomatoes, lemons, peaches, garlic, peas, codlins, beet root, and red cabbage without brine and with cold vinegar. The smaller and more delicate vegetables should not be soaked in brine as long as the larger and the coarser sorts, and may in some cases be pickled cold by pouring over them strong pickling vinegar without scalding.
Spices for pickles should not be ground, and should be slightly bruised or crushed in a mortar, which may be improvised by using a wooden bowl and a potato masher as a pestle, or the end of a hard piece of wood.
When ground spices are used they should be tied up in bags of thin ( muslin. To make spiced pickle add to 1 gallon of vinegar 1 cup of salt, 1 cup of sugar, 1 handful of horseradish, 2 tablespoonfuls of mustard, 1 green pepper.
This is a cluster of pickling-house instructions ending in a spiced pickling liquor. The brine formula itself is plausible, but the surrounding method — unmeasured vinegar strength, cold-packing, alum, and a copper test that does not work — falls outside anything a current preserving guide would sanction.
- Vinegar of unknown acidity is the central problemEverything here assumes household vinegar of unstated strength, and one passage is devoted to reviving vinegar that has gone weak. Safe vinegar pickling depends on a known minimum acidity (commercial vinegar is labelled for this reason); a brine whose acid content is guessed at, then diluted further by the water in the vegetables, can drift into the range where Clostridium botulinum is not suppressed.
- The freezing trick concentrates more than acidFreezing vinegar and lifting off the ice does raise the proportion of acetic acid, but by an amount nobody can measure at home, and it concentrates whatever else is in the barrel along with it. It gives no number to work from, which is precisely what a pickle brine needs.
- Cold-poured pickles with no processingThe instruction to pour strong vinegar over delicate vegetables "without scalding" produces an unpasteurised jar. The page gives no storage instruction at all; sealed and shelved at room temperature, as a modern reader would do, that is a riskier object than an unprocessed crock kept cold and eaten down quickly.
- Alum and the molasses-soaked paperThe page offers both without explanation, under the heading for strengthening weak vinegar; alum was conventionally used in pickling as a crisping agent and a covering laid over the surface as a mold barrier. Alum is no longer recommended in home preserving, and laying paper soaked in molasses over the surface adds sugar and paper fibre to the top of the crock he passyeasts the passage is trying to stop.
- The copper test is not a testAmmonia does form a deep blue complex with dissolved copper, but the color is easily masked by pickle liquor and produces no answer at low concentrations. Do not treat a negative result here as evidence that anything is safe to eat.
- Deliberately greened picklesThe "deep green pickles found on the market" the author distrusts were sometimes greened with copper salts, which is why the copper test appears at all. The fear was well founded; the remedy offered was not.
- Vanished ingredients and wordsIsinglass is collagen from fish swim bladders, once the standard fining agent for vinegar and beer. Codlins are cooking apples, samphire is the coastal succulent, and barberries are the tart red fruit of Berberis, all of which were routine pickling material and mostly are not now.
- If you want spiced picklesUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength, stated processing time and a specified jar size. The salt-sugar-horseradish-mustard-pepper flavour profile here is worth borrowing; the method around it is not.
Copper compounds had been used at least as early as the eighteenth century to give pickles and preserved vegetables an appetising green — Frederick Accum's 1820 treatise on food adulteration in London singled out the practice, and it remained notorious enough that a household manual could assume readers were suspicious of any bright green jar on a grocer's shelf. That suspicion is being turned to profit here: the author's argument is not merely that homemade pickles are wholesome but that they "find a ready and profitable local market," a reminder that the household in these books was still a small producer selling into its own neighbourhood. The advice on clarifying with isinglass, guarding the crock with a mustard bag and reviving weak vinegar reflects a period when vinegar was a variable farm product rather than a standardised bottle, which is exactly why the whole procedure reads as unsafe today.