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Oiled Pickles
100 small cucumbers, ¼ pound of ground mustard, 1 teaspoonful of black pepper, ¼ pound of whole mustard, 1 quart of onions, 1 ounce of celery seed, 1 pint of olive oil, 2 quarts of cider vinegar.
Pare the cucumbers and onions and cut them into thin slices. Put in a layer of cucumbers, then a layer of onions, then a layer of cucumbers and so continue until all have been used. Cover with a cold brine sufficiently strong to bear an egg, stand aside over night. In the morning drain, cover them with cold water, soak two hours and drain again. Put them in a porcelain-lined kettle with sufficient cold vinegar to cover them; stand them over a fire until the vinegar is lukewarm, then stand away over night; drain. This vinegar may be saved for other purposes, but
A cold-process crock pickle of the kind common in American household books before pressure canning: salt, vinegar and oil do all the preserving, and no jar is ever heat-sealed. A few of the ingredient figures need reading in period terms.
- The quantities as writtenThe mustard weights are quarter-pounds: about a cup of ground mustard, and the same weight of whole mustard seed (the recipe does not say which kind), roughly three-quarters of a cup. The single-letter amounts are ones: 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1 quart onions, 1 ounce celery seed, 1 pint olive oil, 2 quarts cider vinegar. No cucumber quantity is stated anywhere in the recipe, and any figure for it is guesswork; something on the order of a gallon of sliced cucumbers would suit the spice and vinegar.
- Brine strong enough to bear an eggThat is the old test for a strong salt solution, in practice about a pound of salt to the gallon of water, or a touch more; roughly a tenth salt by weight, well short of saturation. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt tends to cloud the brine and can darken the slices.
- Porcelain-lined kettleMeaning enamelled cast iron or, today, stainless steel. Vinegar and salt will strip aluminium and bare iron and give the pickles a grey, metallic taste.
- The scalding vinegar stepLukewarm is the whole point. The first vinegar bath draws water out of the slices and firms them; bringing it to a boil cooks the cucumber and you lose the snap that distinguishes an oil pickle from a cooked relish.
- The oil goes in coldThe text breaks off before the dressing is described, so the finish has to be inferred: the olive oil, mustards, celery seed and pepper would be combined with fresh vinegar and poured cold over the drained slices. Mustard flour holds such a mixture in loose emulsion, and the jars will need shaking or turning to keep it distributed.
- Not a canned productNothing in the surviving text is heat-processed or sealed, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle. Keep it cold and eat it within a couple of months. Olive oil clouds and thickens under refrigeration, which is cosmetic; let a jar stand at room temperature briefly before serving.
- YieldNo cucumber quantity is given, so no yield can be stated. The recipe's own timing is two nights: overnight in brine, a two-hour soak in cold water, then a lukewarm vinegar bath and a second night standing before the final drain.
Oil pickles, also written "oiled pickles," appear in American cookery books of the later nineteenth century, and the ingredients run along familiar lines: cucumbers and onions sliced thin, drawn overnight in a heavy salt brine, then dressed with cider vinegar, mustard both ground and whole, celery seed, and a generous measure of olive oil. The oil is what sets them apart from the sweeter mustard pickles of the same period; it coats the slices and carries the mustard flavour. Recipes of this sort belong to the era when a household bought cucumbers by the peck in high summer and put them down without a canner, working instead on salt, acid and a cool cellar.