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Pickled Cucumbers (Gallon vinegar pounds brown)
1/2 gallon vinegar. 3 pounds brown sugar. 2 tablespoonfuls cloves. 2 tablespoonfuls allspice. 2 tablespoonfuls mustard. 2 tablespoonfuls celery. 1 tablespoonful white ginger. 1 tablespoonful cinnamon. 1 tablespoonful black pepper. 2 pods green pepper. 4 lemons sliced. A little horseradish. 12 onions, and as many cucumbers as the vinegar will well cover. Boil all together until the cucumbers are tender, and they will be ready for use in a week or so. To green the fruit: line your brass kettle with grape-leaves, and then pour weak vinegar on the cucumbers, cover with leaves, and boil a little while.--Mrs. E. I.
A sweet spiced cucumber pickle of the sort Virginia households put up by the crockful. Two things in it are out of step with current practice, and one of them is a genuine poisoning risk rather than a matter of taste.
- The brass kettle is the problemBoiling vinegar in an unlined brass or copper vessel dissolves copper into the liquid, forming copper acetate and related salts. That reaction is precisely what turned the pickles bright green, and it was done on purpose throughout the nineteenth century. Copper salts are cumulatively toxic, and the greening instruction cannot be followed in any form.
- Grape leaves are not the greening agentChemically the leaves here are a liner and a cover, not the source of the colour. In modern pickling grape leaves are added for their tannins, which help keep cucumbers crisp; they will not make a pickle green, though period cooks often credited vine leaves with the colour.
- Open-kettle storage"Ready for use in a week or so" assumes the pickles sit in a covered crock or jar in a cool larder with no processing at all. The syrup is acidic and heavily sugared, which is protective, but there is no measured vinegar strength, no headspace and no boiling-water process here. For anything intended to be shelf-stable, use a current tested pickle recipe with a stated acidity and process time.
- Vinegar strength is unstatedNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely, and the recipe's separate call for "weak vinegar" in the greening step shows strength was left to the cook's judgement. Modern bottled vinegar is generally 5 percent acetic acid; the original gives no way to know what strength was intended.
- Quantities and scaleHalf a gallon is 8 cups; 3 pounds of brown sugar is roughly 6 to 7 cups packed. With twelve onions and as many cucumbers as the liquid covers, this is a several-quart batch, sized for a household crock rather than a couple of jars.
- "2 tablespoonfuls celery"Almost certainly celery seed, not celery stalk. The spices were probably whole or coarsely broken rather than ground, as was usual, though the original does not say; ground spice in the same amounts would be overwhelming and would cloud the syrup.
- White ginger and green pepper"White ginger" is scraped or peeled dried ginger root rather than unpeeled; "2 pods green pepper" most likely means two whole fresh hot capsicum pods rather than sweet bell peppers.
- TextureBoiling cucumbers until tender in a sugar syrup gives a soft, translucent sweet pickle rather than a crisp one. That was the intended result, not a fault, and it is closer to a bread-and-butter or sweet chunk pickle than to a dill.
Sweet spiced cucumber pickles in a vinegar-and-brown-sugar syrup were a staple of Southern larders, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, 1878) collected them from contributors by name and initial, as here with Mrs. E. I. The greening instruction is the period detail worth pausing over: cooks on both sides of the Atlantic prized vividly green pickles, and one method often recommended in household books was to boil the fruit in vinegar in a brass or copper pan, which leached copper into the acid liquid. Grape leaves were often laid in as well, and the leaves took the credit. Medical writers were warning against copper-greened pickles well before this book appeared, but recipes printing the method persisted for decades.