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Cucumber Sweet Pickle
First lay the cucumbers in salt and water for one week or ten days; next cut them in slices quarter of an inch thick. Then soak out the salt and boil them in alum water half an hour, and afterwards in ginger tea for one hour. Then make a syrup of one pint water, one quart vinegar, three pounds sugar to every four pounds cucumbers. Flavor with cloves, mace, and cinnamon. Boil all together until the syrup is sufficiently thickened.--Mrs. A. C.
A nineteenth-century sweet pickle in the old style: a long salt cure, then successive boilings, then a heavy sugar-vinegar syrup. Two of its steps — the alum bath and the unmeasured brine — are the ones worth rethinking before you start.
- Skip the alumAlum (potassium aluminum sulfate) was the standard crisping agent of the period, but half an hour at a boil in an unspecified concentration is far beyond anything current practice sanctions, and it leaves a puckering metallic edge. Modern pickling gets the same firmness from trimming the blossom end off each cucumber, or from a food-grade calcium chloride crisping agent used at the labeled rate.
- The brine needs a number"Salt and water" for a week or ten days meant a heavy holding brine, and the old test was that it should be strong enough to float an egg — roughly 1/2 cup pickling salt per quart of water, about 10 percent. A weak brine at room temperature for that long risks going soft and off. Keep the cucumbers fully submerged under a weighted plate and hold them somewhere cool.
- Ginger teaAn infusion, not a syrup: about 2 oz bruised fresh ginger, or a scant ounce of dried whole ginger, simmered in enough water to cover the slices. It perfumes the cucumber and softens the raw-brine taste.
- Proportions, restatedFor every 4 lb sliced cucumber: 1 pint water, 1 quart vinegar, 3 lb sugar. That is a preserving-strength syrup, close to half sugar by weight, which is what keeps the pickle. Use cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity — nineteenth-century household vinegar was variable in strength.
- SpicesRoughly 1 tablespoon whole cloves, 2 or 3 blades of mace, and two cinnamon sticks per batch, tied in cheesecloth so the syrup stays clear. Ground spices will cloud and darken it.
- Reconsider the boiling timesAn hour in ginger tea plus a long syrup boil will collapse a quarter-inch slice into translucent mush. Cut closer to a scant half inch, hold the ginger infusion to 20–30 minutes at a bare simmer, and finish in the syrup only until the slices turn glassy at the edge.
- "Sufficiently thickened"The syrup is ready when it sheets off a spoon and reads about 220–222F — thick enough to coat the slices, thin enough to still pour. Past that it can crystallize in the jar.
- StorageThe original assumes a crock in a cold cellar. Packed hot into clean jars and refrigerated, this keeps for a couple of months; for shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for sweet cucumber pickles rather than trusting the sugar alone.
- YieldFour pounds of cucumbers with three pounds of sugar makes roughly 4 to 5 pints.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials and married names like "Mrs. A. C.", devotes pages to pickles because a Virginia household of the period had to put up its own garden surplus and had sugar and vinegar to spare in a way it did not have refrigeration. Sweet pickling — brine first to draw water and hold the fruit, then a heavy sugar-and-vinegar syrup spiced with cloves, mace and cinnamon — belongs to the same family as the sweet watermelon-rind and peach pickles that ran alongside meat at Southern tables well into the twentieth century. Alum appears throughout American pickle recipes of the era as the accepted way to keep a cucumber crisp through repeated boilings; it fell out of favor gradually across the twentieth century as extension services and cannery guidance recommended against it, and it survives now mostly as a nostalgic ingredient in a few family recipes. The whole spices point to the older tradition of the pickle as a warm, aromatic condiment rather than the sharp dill pickle that later came to dominate.