Sweet Pickle
Boil in three quarts of vinegar four or five pounds sugar, one ounce cinnamon, one ounce allspice, one ounce mace, one-half ounce cloves, and pour all over fourteen pounds damsons or peeled peaches.--Mrs. O. B.
A classic sweet pickled fruit in the old proportions — a spiced vinegar syrup poured hot over raw fruit. Two things need translating: the enormous scale, and the fact that the original assumes you know the pour-off-and-reheat routine that finishes the job.
- Scale it downFourteen pounds of fruit and three quarts of vinegar make a very large batch. Divide everything by seven for a manageable one: 2 lb fruit, about 1 3/4 cups vinegar, 9-11 oz sugar (the original gives a range of four to five pounds), and roughly a teaspoon each of the whole cinnamon, allspice and mace, with half that of cloves.
- The hinge: repeat the pourRepeat the pour -- A single pour of hot syrup over raw fruit penetrates it only slowly. Many period sweet-pickle recipes direct that the syrup be drained off each day for three days, brought back to a boil and poured over the fruit again; this recipe gives no such instruction, but the routine was common, and it helps the fruit stay whole instead of collapsing.
- Whole spices, in a bagAn ounce each of cinnamon, allspice and mace means bark, whole berries and blades he sysyrup muddy and gritty. Tie them in cheesecloth so they can be lifted out; half an ounce of cloves left in for days will overwhelm the fruit.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely. Use cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity, which is the closest modern equivalent in flavour and the safe floor for pickling. Do not dilute it.
- DamsonsSmall, tart, blue-black plums with a heavy bloom and a clinging stone. They come in late summer and are still worth hunting at farmers' markets; Italian prune plums are the usual substitute. Prick each one with a needle so the skin does not burst.
- Peeled peachesBlanch 30 seconds in boiling water and the skins slip. Choose firm freestone peaches slightly under ripe — anything soft enough to eat out of hand will go to mush in the syrup.
- VesselNonreactive only: stainless steel or enamelled cast iron. Hot spiced vinegar strips uncoated aluminium, copper and cast iron and takes on a metallic taste.
- StorageThe original assumes a cool cellar and a crock under a cloth. Keep these in the refrigerator and eat them within a couple of months. If you want jars for the pantry, follow a current tested water-bath recipe for pickled fruit rather than this one, which gives no processing instructions at all.
- ServingScaled down as above, roughly three pints. Sweet pickles of this kind are a condiment, served two or three to a plate beside ham, roast pork, cold beef or game.
Sweet pickled fruit was a familiar presence on the nineteenth-century Southern table. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and its pickle and preserve chapters run long because these were the household's insurance against a winter of salt pork and bread. The technique — a hot sweetened vinegar poured repeatedly over whole fruit — is broadly the one behind mostarda and the German Essigpflaumen, and it long predates reliable canning; sugar and acetic acid together do the preserving, with the spices as much for their keeping reputation as their flavour. Damsons, an old English plum, were too tart to eat raw and were commonly put up in preserves, pickles and cordials. The attribution to "Mrs. O. B." is typical of the book, whose contributors are often reduced to initials — a practice that has left most of them permanently anonymous.