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Boiled Cucumber Pickle
Take fresh cucumbers (size for eating), put them in brine for a few days; take them out, and put them in vinegar to soak for two days. Then wipe them dry, cut them in pieces one inch thick. Make a seasoning of a mixture of allspice, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and whole black pepper, about two ounces to seventy-five cucumbers. Add celery-seed, and onion chopped fine. Take a large stone jar, put a layer of cucumber and a layer of the mixture, with plenty of brown sugar (about eight pounds to a large jar). In this way fill the jar, then cover it with strong vinegar: tie the mouth up securely, put the jar in a pot of cold water, and boil until the cucumber is tender, and they will be ready for use in a few days.--Mrs. C. C. McP.
This is a nineteenth-century crock pickle scaled to a farm household, and it is built entirely on judgement rather than measurement. The points below explain the terms and then why the method cannot be followed safely today.
- Unmeasured brine"Put them in brine for a few days" gives neither salt concentration nor duration in any usable form. Salt strength is what governs whether the cucumbers cure or simply sit and spoil, and there is no way to reconstruct the writer's intent from the text.
- "Strong vinegar" is not a specificationHousehold vinegar in 1879 was often home-made cider vinegar of unknown and variable acidity. Safe vinegar preserving depends on a known acid level throughout the finished jar, and nothing here establishes one.
- The jar is not a canning vesselA stone jar with its mouth tied shut and set in a pot of water is not a sealed pack; the recipe does not say what the cover was made of. It was boiled to soften the cucumbers rather than to sterilise and seal them, and a tied cover admits air, mould and yeast during storage.
- No temperature, no endpoint"Boil until the cucumber is tender" is a texture cue. The contents of a large crock sitting in water heat unevenly and slowly, and tenderness tells you nothing about whether the interior of the pack ever reached a meaningful temperature.
- ScaleSeventy-five cucumbers, roughly two ounces of whole spice and about eight pounds of brown sugar imply a crock of several gallons -- quantities far beyond a modern kitchen batch.
- The spicesMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in blades. Only the pepper is called for whole here; the form of the allspice and cloves is not specified. Celery seed appears in other Virginia sweet-pickle receipts.
- If you want the flavourThe profile here is a sweet spiced bread-and-butter-style pickle. Use a current tested recipe with stated vinegar acidity, weighed salt and sugar, and a proper processing time.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and many of the receipts carry initials at the end. Sweet spiced cucumber pickles of this kind were a standard part of a Southern larder, sitting alongside chow-chow, watermelon-rind pickle and pickled peaches, and they leaned heavily on brown sugar and whole spice to carry a jar of vegetables through to spring. The two-stage treatment here, salt brine first and then vinegar, is the old method of drawing water out of the cucumber before the vinegar goes in, so the finished pickle stays firm rather than turning slack. Boiling the whole crock in a pot of water belongs to the decades before home canning was standardised, and receipts like this one are a good measure of how much a cook was expected to know without being told.