Green Pickle
Put the pickles in a strong brine, strong enough to bear an egg. Three weeks is long enough for them to remain in brine, if you wish to make your pickle early in the fall; but they will keep several months, indeed all the winter, by having them always well covered with the brine.
When ready to make your pickle, drain off every drop of brine, and pour boiling water over the pickles. Repeat this for three mornings in succession. Then pour off this last water, and soak the pickles two days in cold water, changing the water each morning. Next, pouring off this water, scald the pickles three mornings in weak vinegar, weakening the vinegar by putting two quarts of water to one of vinegar. This is the time for greening the pickles, by putting in the jar or keg a layer of pickle, then sprinkling in a little powdered alum, and so on, till the vessel is filled; then pouring on the weakened vinegar. Only use the alum the first morning; but the other mornings pour off the vinegar and pour on a fresh quantity. All this is necessary, if you wish to have pickle perfectly free from the brine, and in a condition to keep. Fill your jars with the pickle thus prepared, and pour over them the best of vinegar, after seasoning it and letting it boil a few minutes. Seasoning to one gallon vinegar: 3 pounds brown sugar. 1 tablespoonful allspice. 1 tablespoonful of cinnamon. 1 tablespoonful of ginger. 1 tablespoonful of black pepper, all pounded. 20 drops oil of cloves, or 3 ounces of cloves. 1 ounce celery-seed. 1 pod red pepper. 2 tablespoonfuls grated horseradish.-Mrs. C. Green Pickles.
Put the pickle in strong brine for two days; then boil the brine and pour it over them hot. Repeat this twice. Then pour over them boiling vinegar and water mixed, three successive times, at intervals of two days. For a three-gallon jar take: 1 teacup black pepper. 1 teacup allspice. 1/2 teacup of ginger. 1/2 teacup of mace. 1/2 teacup of cloves, all beaten, but not fine. 2 heads of cabbage chopped fine. 2 teacups horseradish. 8 onions chopped fine. 1 quart mustard seed.
Take half of the beaten spices and mix with the latter ingredients, also three cups of brown sugar; stuff the mangoes with this. Add the rest to the vinegar with five pounds of sugar, and pour on the pickle hot. This makes very superior pickle.-Miss S. S. V.
Green Pickle [3 gallons]. 2 ounces mace. 1/2 pound ginger, scalded and sliced. 2 ounces cloves. 2 ounces cinnamon. 2 ounces long pepper. 2 ounces allspice. 1 ounce nutmeg. 1/4 pound horseradish scraped, sliced, but not dried. 1 ounce turmeric. 4 ounces black mustard-seed. 1 ounce coriander-seed. 2 ounces garlic, or onion. 2 pounds brown sugar.
Prepare the cucumbers as follows: gather cucumbers, snaps, etc., and put them in a large stone jar, pouring over them a strong brine which has been boiled and skimmed-hot, but not boiling; cover with an old table-cloth to keep the steam in. Let them stand about a week, then take and soak twenty-four hours in cold water. Next put them in a large kettle lined with grape leaves, and fill, covering with weak vinegar. Sprinkle in a dessertspoonful of powdered alum, and cover with grape leaves, setting on the stove until a beautiful bright green. Put in a jar and pour this vinegar over them and let them stand until next day; then dry the pickles with a cloth, and have ready the jar, putting in a layer of the pickles with a layer of the seasoning before mentioned; fill with strong cider vinegar. Tie up closely, and keep in a warm, dry place. The spices must be bruised or beaten tolerately fine before putting with pickle; and a little salad oil is an improvement.-Mrs. P. McG.
Three separate contributors' pickle recipes run together here, all built on the same nineteenth-century sequence: long salt brining, repeated scalding, alum "greening", then spiced vinegar. Several of the terms need translating, and the method as a whole is one that current preserving practice has abandoned.
- Why this one is off the tableThe alum greening step is the central problem. Greening cucumbers to a "beautiful bright green" was often done in period kitchens in an unlined copper or brass kettle, where acid vinegar leaches copper salts into the fruit; alum was the domestic substitute or supplement, and the quantities here are unmeasured beyond "a little" and "a dessertspoonful." This recipe calls for a kettle lined with grape leaves rather than bare metal, but alum is no longer recommended in pickling at all, and heating acidified vegetables in reactive metal is a documented route to copper poisoning.
- Unmeasured brine and acid"Strong enough to bear an egg" is a rough density test, indicating a brine of roughly ten per cent salt rather than anything like saturation, but the several days of freshening in changed cold water and weak vinegar pull that salt back out again with no way to know where you have landed. The finishing vinegar is not measured against the volume of vegetables and is diluted further by the water clinging to them, so the final acidity of the jar is unknown.
- No processing, warm storageThe jars are "tied up closely" and kept in a warm, dry place. There is no heat processing and no airtight seal, which is why these pickles depended on very high salt and very sharp vinegar to survive. A current tested recipe with a measured vinegar-to-water ratio and a boiling-water bath should be used instead.
- MangoesIn American cookery of this period a "mango" is not the tropical fruit but a small muskmelon, or sometimes a large cucumber or green pepper, hollowed out and stuffed before pickling. The second recipe's cabbage, onion, horseradish and mustard-seed mixture is the stuffing.
- SnapsMost likely snap beans, picked young and pickled alongside the cucumbers; the recipe says only "cucumbers, snaps, etc."
- Teacups and other loose measuresA teacup in a Virginia kitchen of the 1870s is generally reckoned at about six fluid ounces, not the eight of a modern cup. A gill, should you meet it elsewhere in the book, is half a cup. "Beaten, but not fine" means cracked in a mortar, not ground to powder.
- Long pepper and oil of clovesLong pepper (Piper longum) is a hotter, sweeter relative of black pepper, still sold by spice merchants. Oil of cloves is clove essential oil, and twenty drops standing in for three ounces of whole cloves shows how concentrated it is; it was a common pantry item then because it doubled as a toothache remedy.
- Grape leavesThe kettle lined and covered with grape leaves is doing real work. Grape leaves are rich in tannins, which are held to inhibit the enzymes that soften cucumbers, and they were also believed to help fix the green colour. Grape leaves still turn up in modern pickle recipes, though current guidance is that trimming the blossom ends does the same job.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers contributions from Virginia housekeepers, many of them identified only by initials, and the three initialled recipes here show how a single household task could be done three different ways within one community. Green pickle in this sense means pickle kept green, and the colour mattered a great deal. Cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward describe achieving it in copper or brass vessels, and by the nineteenth century alum had become the polite domestic alternative, recommended in print for decades before its risks and its uselessness were both established. The enormous spicing, the pounds of brown sugar, and the whole apparatus of stone jars and weeks of brining belong to a kitchen that had to put up cucumbers in high summer against a winter with no fresh vegetables in it, and had cheap sugar, cheap vinegar and a great deal of unpaid or underpaid labour with which to do it.