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Shallot Pickle
I quart (4 cups) vinegar I blade mace 2 cloves 4 allspices A pinch of red pepper 6 whole white peppers 2 saltspoonfuls salt Put the vinegar and the spices into an earthenware pan and boil them for five minutes. Strain and leave to cool.
Skin and divide up the shallots, place them in perfectly dry pickle jars, fill up the jars with the vinegar.
Cover and leave for two months before using.
A cold-fill spiced-vinegar pickle of the plain English sort: the vinegar does all the work, and the two-month wait is not optional. A few of the measures need translating and one quantity is missing altogether.
- The missing quantityNo weight of shallots is given. A quart of spiced vinegar will cover several pounds of peeled shallots, depending on how tightly they are packed and how many jars are filled.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoonfuls is about 1/2 teaspoon of salt for the whole quart. This is seasoning, not preservation — the acid preserves the pickle.
- Blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, not a spoonful of ground mace. If only ground is available use a scant 1/4 teaspoon and strain through muslin, since it will not settle out.
- Whole white peppers and allspicesBoth are counted as whole berries here: six white peppercorns, four allspice berries. The pinch of red pepper means dried cayenne or a small dried chilli, not paprika.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid — standard malt, cider or distilled white all qualify. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid "dressing" vinegar; the keeping quality of the pickle depends entirely on the acid.
- The earthenware panThe point of earthenware is that it does not react with hot vinegar. Any non-reactive pan — stainless steel, enamel, glass — does the same job. Avoid bare aluminium, copper or cast iron, which will taint the vinegar and dull the colour.
- Perfectly dry jarsThis is the hinge of the recipe. Wash the jars, then dry them thoroughly — a spell in a low oven will do it — and let them come back to room temperature before filling. Water clinging inside dilutes the vinegar at the surface and is where a cloudy film starts.
- Cool vinegar, cool shallotsStraining and cooling the vinegar before pouring keeps the shallots crisp; hot vinegar softens them. Make sure the shallots stay fully submerged, since any exposed above the surface will discolour and spoil.
- Storage and the two monthsKeep the jars sealed in a cool, dark cupboard. The wait lets the raw allium harshness fade into the spiced vinegar; opened early, the pickle tastes thin and aggressive. Once open, refrigerate.
Spiced-vinegar pickles like this one are a staple of the English store cupboard, and shallots suit the job because they are small enough to pickle whole and sweeten as the vinegar works on them. Spicing of this kind — mace, cloves, allspice, white pepper, a pinch of cayenne — is close to the pickling-vinegar mixtures found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British household books, boiled briefly to draw out the aromatics and then strained so the finished jars stay clear. Shallots were lifted in late summer, so a jar put down then would be ready by the time winter's cold meats and cheese wanted a sharp accompaniment.