Home › Cookery › To Pickle Martinas (Put the martinas in a strong)
To Pickle Martinas (Put the martinas in a strong)
Put the martinas in a strong brine of salt and water let them remain a week or ten days. Then wash them, and put them in cold vinegar, to soak the salt and greenish taste out of them. When ready to pickle, lay them out to drain; scald the following ingredients in a gallon of vinegar, and pour over them in a jar; if not full, fill up with cold vinegar, 1 large handful of sliced horseradish. 1 teacup of allspice. 1/2 cup of black pepper. 1/2 cup of mustard-seed (black). 2 tablespoonfuls cloves. 2 ponds brown sugar. 3 or four onions, sliced.
The spices to be beaten, but not too fine. This quantity fills a two-gallon jar.--Mrs. J. J. M.
This is a crock pickle of martynia — the young seed pods of Proboscidea louisianica, the unicorn plant or devil's claw — and almost everything that needs translating here is either a vessel, a vinegar strength, or a typesetter's slip.
- What martinas areMartynia, also spelled martinias or martinoes, are the immature green pods of the unicorn plant, picked at about two inches long while still soft and fuzzy, before the woody hook forms. They are not sold commercially; if you cannot grow them, small okra pods or gherkin cucumbers take this same spice mixture well.
- "2 ponds brown sugar"A misprint for two pounds. Against a gallon of vinegar that gives a distinctly sweet pickle, in the sweet-and-spiced Virginia style; a pound still reads as sweet if you want it less so.
- Teacups and cupsA nineteenth-century teacup is not a fixed measure; it is usually reckoned at somewhere between half and three-quarters of a modern cup, so the allspice may be anything from about 1/2 to 3/4 cup. The pepper and mustard seed are given in cups rather than teacups. These are whole spices, which is why the volumes look extravagant.
- Vinegar strength is the hingeOld cider vinegar varied, and a weak vinegar is what spoils a pickle like this. Use commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity for both the soaking stage and the finished pickle, and do not dilute it with water.
- The vinegar soak is not optionalThe week to ten days in strong brine draws water out of the pods; the cold vinegar soak that follows pulls the excess salt and the raw green flavour back out. Skipping it gives a pickle that is both too salty and grassy-tasting.
- Beaten, not ground"Beaten, but not too fine" means cracked under a rolling pin or in a mortar. Powdered spice clouds the vinegar and turns it muddy; cracked spice releases flavour and can be tied in cheesecloth if you would rather not fish it out later.
- Scalding the vinegarBring the spiced, sweetened vinegar just to a boil, then pour it hot over the drained pods. Long boiling drives off acetic acid and softens the pods before they have taken up any brine.
- StorageNothing here is heat-processed, so this is a refrigerator or cold-cellar pickle, not a shelf-stable canned one. Keep the pods fully submerged, use a clean utensil each time, and discard the jar if the brine goes cloudy, ropy or off-smelling. It wants three to four weeks before it is worth eating.
- YieldAs the note says, a two-gallon jar — a considerable quantity by modern standards. The proportions scale down cleanly to a single quart if you keep the gallon of vinegar to two pounds of sugar ratio.
Martynia was a familiar kitchen-garden pickling plant in the American South and Midwest in the nineteenth century, and seedsmen sold it explicitly for that purpose; the pods were valued because they were ready in high summer. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives identified by initials rather than by name — hence the "Mrs. J. J. M." signature — carries a long chapter of such pickles, and this one is typical of the sweet, heavily spiced, sugar-and-cider-vinegar school of Southern preserving. The plant is now better known by its later name, devil's claw, from the hooked woody seed capsule the pod becomes if left on the vine, and its use as food survives mainly in the Southwest, where Tohono O'odham growers have long cultivated related varieties for basketry fibre and for the young pods as a vegetable.