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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Pickle
To Pickle Large Cucumbers.-Pare 7 pounds of large cucumbers, remove the seeds and cut into inch pieces.
Cover with vinegar and water, half and half, and add a large pinch of salt.
Boil until clear but not overdone. Drain in a colander. To one pint of good vinegar add 3½ pounds of brown sugar; as soon as it comes to the boiling point put the cucumbers back into the kettle and let the whole boil up. Again drain through the colander, and when cold put them in layers in a jar, sprinkle between the layers stick cinnamon, cloves, allspice, a few kernels of black pepper, a little mace, and a handful of raisins. Cover with the pickling liquid and seal.
Or cut a piece from the large end of each cucumber, leaving it attached by a piece of the skin. Scoop out the seeds and steep in strong brine for a week until entirely yellow. Stuff with equal parts mustard seed, ground ginger, and pepper, with the addition of small onions, shallots, or garlic if desired. Sew on the tops and cover with pickling liquid as for gherkins.
Two sweet-pickle methods for the big overgrown cucumbers that used to be left on the vine deliberately. The text is workable, but one number is almost certainly a printer's slip and the storage instruction needs rethinking.
- "31 pounds of brown sugar"Read this as 3½ pounds, misset in the original. Even 3½ lb to one pint of vinegar is a heavy syrup, which is the point of a sweet pickle of this era, but 31 lb to a pint is physically impossible.
- The cucumbers themselvesThese are mature field cucumbers with tough skin and developed seeds, the kind now sold as slicers left too long or found at farm stands late in the season. That is why they are pared and seeded; a modern pickling cucumber would collapse under this treatment.
- "Boil until clear but not overdone"This is the hinge. The flesh turns translucent as it cooks; the original gives no time, so watch it closely, because inch pieces go to mush soon after and no amount of syrup will firm them again.
- Kernels of black pepperWhole peppercorns. Likewise "stick cinnamon" is bark in quill form rather than ground, and mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, sold as blades. Whole spices are correct here: ground spice clouds the syrup.
- Strong brine, unspecifiedThe second method calls for steeping a week in strong brine until the cucumbers turn yellow, with no proportion given. Period receipts often described a strong brine as one that would float an egg, but no strength is specified here and the original leaves it genuinely open.
- Sealing and storage"Seal" here means a hot jar and a waxed or clamped lid, with no processing time or temperature. Treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and keep it cold; for a shelf-stable jar, follow a current tested pickling procedure with a measured vinegar strength and a timed water bath.
- Vinegar strength"Good vinegar" in 1908 usually meant cider vinegar, whose acidity was variable; modern bottled vinegar is standardised at 5 percent, so the sharpness against the sugar is more predictable than the original could assume.
- YieldThe 7 pounds is the weight before paring and seeding; the original states no finished quantity, and it will depend on how far the pieces cook down.
Household Discoveries belongs to the great turn-of-the-century wave of American domestic encyclopedias, and its pickling chapter assumes a garden that produced more cucumbers than anyone could eat fresh. The first method is a straightforward sweet pickle of the sort filed under "sweet cucumber" or "chip" pickle in nineteenth-century receipt books, where a syrup of brown sugar, vinegar and whole spice preserved vegetables that were past their crisp prime. The second, hollowing a cucumber, brining it yellow, stuffing it with mustard seed and spice and sewing the lid back on, is the technique English and American cooks called making "mangoes": the name is generally traced to attempts to imitate the spiced pickled mangoes arriving from India, first with small melons and later with cucumbers, and the stuffed-melon "mango" is documented mainly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American receipt books, surviving in American cookbooks long after anyone remembered what the original fruit tasted like. Raisins in the spice layers are a period touch, adding sweetness and a little fruit acid as they plump in the syrup.