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To Pickle Ripe Cucumbers
Take them yellow, but not too ripe, scrape the seeds well out; lay them in salt and water twenty-four hours, then make syrup same as for peaches; in a week scald the vinegar again.--Mrs. C.
This is a sweet vinegar pickle made from overgrown cucumbers, and it assumes you already know the book's peach syrup and its habit of re-scalding brine. Two things need filling in: the syrup and what to do instead of the weekly scald.
- "Yellow, but not too ripe"These are cucumbers left on the vine until the skin turns yellow and the seeds harden — the kind supermarkets never sell. Look for large overgrown cucumbers at a farm stand in late summer, peel them, halve lengthwise and scrape the seed cavity clean with a spoon. Firm flesh is essential; anything spongy will collapse in the syrup.
- The salt and waterNo proportion is given. A brine of roughly 1/2 cup pickling salt to 1 quart water, enough to cover, is a workable modern equivalent; 24 hours draws out water and helps the flesh stay firm. Rinse and drain well afterward or the finished pickle will be aggressively salty.
- "Syrup same as for peaches"The peach syrup is not reproduced here; sweet pickle syrups of this kind are sugar boiled with vinegar and whole spice — on the order of 1 lb sugar to 1 pint cider vinegar, with a stick of cinnamon and a spoonful of whole cloves, boiled until clear. Pour it boiling over the drained cucumbers in a crock or jar so they are fully submerged.
- Use vinegar of known strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied wildly. Use commercial cider or white vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity, and do not dilute it further — the acid, not the sugar, is what preserves.
- The weekly scald, and what it was forDraining off the syrup, boiling it and returning it hot was routine practice for a crock standing in a warm pantry; it would check fermentation or a surface film, and it also thickens the syrup as water evaporates. There is no reason to do it in a refrigerator.
- StorageTreat the result as a refrigerator pickle: pack into clean jars, cool, and keep cold, where it will hold for a couple of months and improve for the first two weeks. For jars meant to sit on a shelf, follow a current tested boiling-water-canning recipe rather than this one — it gives no jar sizes, headspace or processing time.
- Yield and servingThree or four large ripe cucumbers, prepared this way, fill about two pint jars. Serve in thick slices or chunks alongside ham, cold roast meat or a plate of beans, in the place a sweet chowchow or watermelon rind pickle would take.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (usually dated 1878, Louisville: John P. Morton), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from recipes sent in by Virginia housewives, is full of these clipped contributions signed only with an initial and assuming the shared vocabulary of the Southern preserving pantry, so "syrup same as for peaches" was direction enough. The recipe also reflects a garden economy: a cucumber that outran the picking got too seedy and bitter for a slicing pickle, so it was hollowed out and candied in spiced vinegar rather than thrown to the hogs. Sweet pickles of ripe cucumber, muskmelon and watermelon rind occupied the same niche in the period — a use for a vegetable past its prime — and the related stuffed version, made by filling the scraped halves with mustard seed and spice, was sometimes called in American cookbooks a "mangoe," after the imported Indian pickled mango it was meant to imitate.