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Sweet Cucumber Pickle
Slice cucumbers and soak in brine a week; then soak in salt water until the salt is extracted sufficiently. Boil in strong alum water half an hour, then in ginger tea half an hour. Make a syrup of one quart good vinegar, one pint water, three pounds sugar, to four pounds cucumbers; season with mace, cinnamon, cloves, and celery-seed. Put in the cucumbers and boil till the syrup is thick enough. Add some sliced ginger.--Mrs. S. M.
A nineteenth-century sweet pickle in the old four-stage style: brine, freshen, firm, then candy in spiced vinegar syrup. Most of the work is waiting, and two of the four stages can be reconsidered entirely.
- The hinge: don't overcook the slicesBetween the alum bath, the ginger bath and the syrup, the cucumbers here spend well over an hour at a boil, which is what turns sweet pickle into translucent mush. Modern practice firms cucumbers with cold and calcium rather than prolonged heat, and keeps the syrup boiling only until it thickens.
- Brine strength is not givenNineteenth-century pickle recipes usually meant a heavy salt solution, often described as strong enough to float an egg; modern readings of such directions run up to about 1 cup pickling salt per quart of water. A week at room temperature in an under-salted brine will spoil rather than cure, so use a measured brine, keep the slices fully submerged, and discard the batch if it turns slimy, cloudy or off-smelling.
- Freshening"Soak in salt water until the salt is extracted" means successive changes of fresh or lightly salted water, usually 12 to 24 hours with two or three changes, until a slice tastes seasoned rather than salty. Taste is the only test.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard crisping agent and is still sold, but extension services no longer recommend it: it contributes a puckering metallic edge and, in the quantities implied by "strong alum water," can cause nausea. Calcium chloride pickle crisp, or simply trimming the blossom end and chilling the cucumbers, does the same job.
- Ginger teaA strong infusion of ginger root in water; the recipe does not say whether dried or fresh, and its closing 'sliced ginger' could be either. Make the infusion strong from bruised root; ground ginger will cloud the pickle.
- Proportions and spicesOne quart vinegar is 4 cups, one pint water is 2 cups, to 3 lb sugar and 4 lb prepared cucumbers. Tie the mace, cinnamon, cloves and celery seed in cheesecloth unless you want them in the jar; whole spices are presumably meant here.
- "Thick enough"Aim for about the consistency of thin honey off a cold spoon; on a candy thermometer that is in the region of 220F, though the original gives no temperature. It thickens further as it cools, and a syrup boiled much past that point risks crystallizing in the jar.
- StorageThe original assumes stoneware crocks in a cool cellar and heavy sugar as the preservative. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath process for sweet pickles; otherwise refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
- YieldFour pounds of cucumbers with this quantity of syrup fills roughly five to six pints.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathers recipes from some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, which is why this one ends with the initials of its contributor rather than a headnote. Sweet pickles of this kind — cucumbers, melon rind, peaches — were a staple of the Southern pickle shelf, and the four-stage method reflects a period when a preserved cucumber was expected to be glassy and firm months later, not fresh-tasting. The alum bath was standard advice in American cookbooks from the early 1800s onward and survived in print well into the twentieth century before food scientists concluded it did little that cold water and calcium salts could not do better. Celery seed alongside mace, cinnamon and cloves is often described as a distinctly American touch.