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Pickled Egg-Plant
Sugar Mixed spices Peel egg-plants into inch thick slices and soak them in salted water for three hours. Drain and place in water, add a little lemon juice, and leave for three hours. Drain and pour over the slices some hot spiced vinegar, allowing one cupful of sugar and one and a half tablespoonfuls of mixed spices to one quart of vinegar.
Place the egg-plant slices in stoneware jars, bring the vinegar to boiling point, and add it. Cover and seal.
This is a shelf-stable preserve built on an unspecified vinegar and no heat process, and eggplant is a low-acid vegetable. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- Why the seal is the problemThe slices are packed raw into stoneware, covered with boiling vinegar, then "covered and sealed" with no boiling-water or pressure processing. A hot pour heats only the outer surface of an inch-thick slice; the interior never reaches a temperature that destroys spoilage organisms, and the sealed anaerobic jar is exactly the environment Clostridium botulinum favours if the acidity is not reliably low.
- Eggplant is low-acidFresh eggplant is generally reported somewhere between about pH 4.5 and 5.5, well above the 4.6 line, and in thick slices it buffers the vinegar it sits in. Whether the finished jar ends up below pH 4.6 depends on the ratio of vegetable to liquid, the slice thickness and the vinegar's strength, none of which this recipe controls.
- The vinegar is unspecifiedPeriod recipes assumed household cider or malt vinegar of unknown strength; modern tested pickle recipes require vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid, stated on the label, and never diluted below that.
- Stoneware jars do not sealA crock covered with a cloth, paper and wax, or a lid pressed down over the rim, is not a hermetic closure and gives no vacuum to check. There is no way to tell a failed seal from a sound one, and the recipe offers no storage temperature.
- The long soaks are not a preservative stepThree hours in salted water and three in acidulated water draw out moisture and keep the flesh pale, but a brief salt soak at room temperature is a texture and colour treatment, not a cure. Nothing in the process compensates for the missing heat step.
- If you want pickled eggplantUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, or treat it as a refrigerator pickle eaten within days. Do not adapt the instructions above for storage.
- One wording note"Peel egg-plants into inch thick slices" means pare the skin, then cut the flesh into inch-thick rounds; "mixed spices" is not specified here, and period pickling mixtures varied, commonly drawing on mustard seed, allspice, cloves, peppercorns and cinnamon.
Pickled eggplant belongs to a long Mediterranean and Middle Eastern tradition, and it appears in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American cookbooks among the other vinegar-and-spice pickles of the larder. Eggplant itself was still faintly exotic in Anglo-American households of the period, often called by its older name of guinea squash in the American South and frequently salted before cooking on the belief that this drew out bitterness. The instruction to pack into stoneware jars points to a period when glass jars with rubber-ringed screw closures were available but by no means universal.