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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Onions
Pickled Onions. To prepare onions for pickling, "top and tail" them, remove the outer skins and steep them in brine for a period of two or three days, to two weeks or more.
Afterwards freshen them in clear water for a period of one to three days.
Or if preferred, boil them in clear water or brine for ten or fifteen minutes. Afterwards pack them in widemouthed glass bottles or jars, and cover with pure vinegar or spiced pickling liquid scalding hot or cold.
When cold seal for use. The addition of a spoonful of olive oil to each hottle is said to keep the onions white. Cork tightly and cover the corks with bottle wax or melted paraffin. Seal with cotton batting.
To Select Pickling Onions. Choose for pickling small silver-skin button onions, preferably of uniform size.
Gather them when they are quite dry and ripe and pick them over carefully, rejecting any that are soft, unripe, or spotted. To Pickle Onions Cold. - Place the onions in a clean, dry glass bottle or jar, cover them with cold vinegar and add mixed spices as preferred. Add a little mustard seed, mace, and capsicum, or allspice and black pepper unground or grated, or sliced horseradish or garlic, capsicum and paprika, if desired. Seal the bottle and let stand two or three weeks before using. Onions are very easily pickled in this way and have an exquisite flavor, but will not keep more than about six or eight months.
This is a set of general directions rather than a tested preserving method, and several of its instructions fall outside anything now considered sound for shelf-stable pickles. The notes below explain the terms and the problems.
- No acidity is specified"pure vinegar" could mean anything from a weak cider vinegar to a strong distilled product, and the recipe gives the cook no way to know which. Shelf-stable pickling depends on a known acid concentration throughout the jar, which this recipe never establishes and the cook cannot verify.
- The olive oil layerA spoonful of oil floating on top of the brine is offered as a cosmetic trick to keep the onions white. Oil sitting on the surface of a vegetable pack is a practice modern guidance warns against, and combined with unmeasured acid and months of room-temperature storage it is the instruction here that gives most cause for concern.
- Corks, wax and cotton battingNone of these produce a seal that can be verified or that excludes contamination reliably. A corked and waxed bottle is not a substitute for a two-piece lid processed to a known temperature, and it gives no signal when the seal has failed.
- The brine is a guess"Steep them in brine" for "two or three days, to two weeks or more" gives neither a salt ratio nor a temperature. In a modern kitchen at 70F the same instruction can describe an uncontrolled ferment.
- No process stepThe onions are either soaked or boiled, then packed and covered with liquid "scalding hot or cold" and sealed. Filling a jar with hot liquid is not a heat process; nothing here brings the packed, sealed jar to a temperature that matters.
- Storage claimThe recipe itself says cold-pickled onions "will not keep more than about six or eight months." Use a current tested pickling recipe with a stated vinegar strength and process time.
- Terms worth knowing"Top and tail" means trimming the stem and root ends. "Capsicum" here is a hot red pepper or cayenne, distinct from the paprika listed beside it. "Silver-skin button onions" are the small white pickling onions still sold under that name, roughly half an inch to an inch across.
Pickled onions were an English public-house and cold-table staple, and the small white silverskin was grown specifically for the purpose. Household Discoveries belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American compendia that gathered kitchen, laundry and workshop practice into one volume, and its preserving chapters read like collected hearsay: note the hedged "is said to keep the onions white" and the wide alternative ranges for every step. That looseness was normal. The science of acidity and anaerobic spoilage that governs modern canning guidance was only beginning to be applied to domestic practice " federal and land-grant extension bulletins with tested processing times came later, and they superseded pages like this one.