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To Pickle Martinas (Take one gallon pot full)
Take one gallon pot full of martinas. Make a brine strong enough to bear an egg; keep them covered for ten days. Take them out and wash them in cold water, then put them in cold vinegar. Let them remain for ten days; drain them, and put them in the jar intended for use. In half a gallon of vinegar scald a large handful of horseradish, scraped fine.
A cupful black pepper. 1 cupful ginger. 1/2 cupful black mustard-seed. 3 tablespoonfuls of beaten cloves. 3 onions sliced fine. 1 pod red pepper. 3 pounds brown sugar.
Pour them over the pickle, and fill with cold vinegar.--Mrs. S. D.
A twenty-day sweet-and-spiced crock pickle, of the kind that was made in quantity in late summer and drawn on all winter. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need translating: the vegetable itself and the strength of the brine.
- What martinas areMartinas (also spelled martynia) are the young green seed pods of Proboscidea louisianica, the unicorn plant or devil's claw, grown in Southern gardens specifically for pickling. They must be picked young, no more than two inches or so, before the woody hooked beak forms. Seed is still sold by heirloom suppliers; failing that, the same treatment was routinely given to small cucumbers, young okra or green beans.
- Brine strong enough to bear an eggConventionally reckoned at somewhere around a 10 percent salt solution; the old rule is that the egg floats with a patch about the size of a nickel or a quarter showing. That works out at roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of pickling salt per gallon of water, but it is worth testing with the egg rather than trusting the cup. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt can cloud the brine and darken the pods.
- Vessel and weightA "gallon pot" holds about four quarts of pods; in this period it would most likely have been a stoneware crock, though the recipe does not say. Whatever you use, the pods must stay fully submerged under both the brine and the vinegar -- a plate with a weight on it does the job. Anything that bobs above the surface will go soft or mould.
- Vinegar acidityNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied considerably in strength. Use a commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity throughout, and do not dilute it. The ten-day cold vinegar soak is what actually preserves the pickle after the salt is washed out.
- "Beaten cloves" and the spice measuresBeaten means pounded in a mortar: coarsely crushed whole cloves rather than fine commercial powder, which would turn the vinegar muddy and bitter. The cup measures of black pepper and ginger are most likely whole peppercorns and dried whole or cracked ginger by volume rather than ground spice, though the recipe does not specify. Tied loose in a muslin bag they can be lifted out later.
- Scald, not boil downBring the half gallon of vinegar with the horseradish, spices, onion and sugar just to a simmer to dissolve the sugar and draw out the aromatics, then pour it over hot. A long hard boil cooks off some of the vinegar and flattens the horseradish, which is the whole point of the flavouring.
- Three pounds of sugarThis is a decidedly sweet pickle by modern taste — closer to a chowchow or sweet chip pickle than a dill. Halving the sugar changes only the flavour, not the safety, since the vinegar does the preserving.
- Storage and yieldA gallon of pods plus the spiced vinegar and the vinegar used to fill will run to rather more than eight pint jars. The original assumes a cool cellar and a crock kept topped up with vinegar; refrigerate the finished jars, and check that the pickle stays covered with liquid. Flavour improves after a month.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers -- hence the "Mrs. S. D." signature -- and it carries a substantial pickle chapter, which tells you how central preserving was to a household that fed itself from a garden. Martynia is a genuinely American oddity: native to the southern plains and northern Mexico, it was grown in kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century largely for this purpose, since the young pod pickles crisp and the mature pod hardens into the dramatic hooked seed capsule that gives the plant its devil's-claw name. Nineteenth-century seed catalogues did list it as a pickling plant. The two-stage method here -- a long salt cure, then a long vinegar soak, then a spiced sweet liquor -- was a common treatment for firm vegetables before reliable canning.