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Pickled Onions
Small button onions Salt water I quart (4 cups) vinegar 2 blades mace 2 bay leaves 1 tablespoonful sugar 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful allspices 8 cloves 1 teaspoonful whole peppers Take the onions, remove the outer skin with the fingers and the second skin with a silver knife, throw them into salt water, allowing them to remain for twenty-four hours. Then put them on the fire in an earthenware pan with fresh salt water and let them come to a boil. Remove from the fire, pour off the water, put the onions into a large stoneware jar, and pour over the hot vinegar, which has been previously scalded, with the spices. When spices are used, they should be put into a small cheese-cloth bag and thrown into the vinegar; this obviates the necessity of straining.
A straightforward cold-pack vinegar pickle: the only real work is peeling, and the only real decision is what vinegar you use.
- The hinge: acidityUse vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity (standard distilled white, cider or malt). Wine vinegars and artisan bottles are often weaker, and a weak pickle will soften and spoil rather than keep.
- The salt waterThe original gives no strength. A workable brine is 1/2 cup pickling or kosher salt per quart of water, enough to cover. Avoid iodised table salt, which clouds the liquid.
- Quantity of onionsNo amount is given. One quart of vinegar with these spices will cover something in the region of 2 to 2 1/2 lb of peeled button onions; have two or three quart jars ready, as packed onions plus liquid may need more room than you expect.
- Silver knife, earthenware panBoth are the period's way of saying non-reactive. Onion sulphur compounds and vinegar attack iron, copper and aluminium, discolouring the onions and tainting the flavour. Stainless steel, glass or enamel is fine now.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one whole piece. If you only have ground mace, roughly 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon in the spice bag stands in for the two blades; err low, as ground mace is more assertive.
- Scalding the vinegarBring it to a bare simmer with the spice bag rather than a rolling boil; prolonged hard boiling can drive off some acetic acid and dulls the spices.
- Don't overcook the onions"Let them come to a boil" means exactly that. Once the water reaches a boil, drain immediately; another few minutes and the onions turn slack instead of staying crisp.
- StorageThis is not a sealed, processed preserve. Cover the jars, cool, and keep them refrigerated rather than in a cupboard. They are edible after a week and best after three to four, by which time the heat of the raw onion has mellowed.
Pickled onions are one of the oldest and most durable of British table pickles, eaten with cold meat, cheese and bread. Their appearance in a casserole book is less odd than it looks: the same glazed stoneware crocks and jars that served for slow oven cookery were also vessels for holding a pickle through the winter. The spicing here mace, bay, allspice, cloves, whole pepper is the conventional English pickling blend of the nineteenth century, and the tidy instruction to bag the spices in cheesecloth rather than strain the vinegar afterwards is a practical shortcut.