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Preparing Pickles
Vegetables for pickle should be kept in cold and strong brine till they turn yellow: then put vine-leaves in the bottom of the kettle, then a layer of vegetables and a layer of leaves till full. Pour on them, boiling salt and water and let them boil until a bright green. Take them, while hot, and place in weak vinegar for a whole week. Then add them to the spiced vinegar. Afterwards rub on them a little turmeric. Prepare the spiced vinegar in May, and expose to the sun every day for some time.-Mrs. R.
This is a general method rather than a single recipe, and it belongs to a school of pickling that modern food safety has abandoned. The points below explain what the terms mean and why the sequence fails.
- No acidity is specified anywhereThe vegetables sit in "weak vinegar" for a week at room temperature and are then transferred to a spiced vinegar of unstated strength. Safe vinegar pickling depends on using vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity, in enough volume that the water in the vegetables cannot dilute the finished product above pH 4.6. Nothing here allows that to be calculated, and low-acid vegetables held in weak acid at room temperature are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum.
- Sun-exposed vinegarStanding the spiced vinegar in the sun for days was meant to draw out the spices, but it also warms it and encourages the surface growth of vinegar-mother and moulds, which consume acetic acid and raise the pH of the very liquid the pickles depend on.
- The brine stage"Cold and strong brine till they turn yellow" is a salt cure of indefinite length and unstated salt concentration, judged here by colour alone; there is no way to reproduce it as a controlled process, and a weak brine will simply rot the vegetables.
- Greening in the kettleBoiling vegetables between layers of grape leaves to bring them to "a bright green" is the polite version of a practice that in this period often meant boiling them in an unlined copper or brass kettle, where the acid liquor formed copper salts. Grape leaves themselves are harmless, but any recipe of this era that prizes a vivid green in a pickle should be read with that history in mind, and no copper or brass vessel should be used with vinegar or brine.
- Turmeric rubbed onHere it is a colourant only, dusted on the drained vegetables to give the yellow-gold of a mixed pickle or piccalilli. It contributes nothing to preservation.
- Vine-leavesGrape leaves contain tannins, which firm pectin and were believed to keep pickles crisp. Modern equivalents in a current recipe are oak, horseradish or blackcurrant leaves, or calcium chloride.
- "Prepare the spiced vinegar in May"A seasonal instruction rather than a chemical one: making the spiced vinegar in May would leave it steeped and ready for the summer's pickling season.
- If you want mixed picklesUse a current tested recipe with weighed salt, measured 5 percent vinegar and a stated processing time. The flavourings from this page transfer perfectly well to one.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from a wide circle of Virginia households, which is why so many entries end with an initial rather than a name — "Mrs. R." would have been known to the book's first readers and is anonymous to us. A page like this one is less a recipe than a set of standing instructions for the pickle crock, the kind of knowledge that passed between women directly and only reached print when a compiler asked for it. The prizing of a bright green pickle runs right through Anglo-American cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Hannah Glasse and her successors gave methods for it, and the practice of greening in copper was denounced by writers on food adulteration for decades before it disappeared. That the spiced vinegar is begun in May and set in the sun is a reminder that this was calendar cooking, with the whole year's preserving arranged around when things ripened.