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Pickled Peppers
Take one dozen large, green peppers, six red peppers, six yellow sweet peppers. Make a small incision at one side and carefully remove the seeds without breaking the peppers. Make brine sufficiently strong to float an egg. Pour over the peppers and stand aside over night. Next morning drain, and wash carefully in cold water. Put one quart of vinegar in a porcelain kettle, bring to boiling point, pour over the peppers and stand aside to cool. When cold, drain, throw this vinegar away. If the vinegar is very strong, add an equal quantity of cold water. Take sufficient fresh vinegar to cover the peppers, bring to boiling point, pour this over the peppers, and when cold put them away for use.
These are nice to mix with cabbage for pepper sauce during the winter.
This is a room-temperature vinegar pickle with no sealing step, no processing, and an instruction that can cut the acidity in half. The problems are worth understanding even though the method should not be followed.
- The diluting step is the fatal one"If the vinegar is very strong, add an equal quantity of cold water" can take a 5 percent vinegar down to about 2.5 percent. Peppers are a low-acid vegetable, and a pickling liquid below roughly 4 percent acetic acid does not reliably hold the finished jar out of the range where Clostridium botulinum can grow.
- Nothing is processed or sealedThe peppers are simply covered with hot vinegar, cooled, and "put away for use." There is no jar, no lid, no boiling-water bath and no stated storage temperature. A whole pepper with a slit in its side also holds air and un-acidified liquid inside its cavity, which is exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid pocket that matters here.
- Vinegar strength was not standardisedHousehold vinegar of this period ranged widely in acidity, and vinegar sold from a barrel was anyone's guess, which may be why the recipe qualifies its instruction with 'if the vinegar is very strong.' Modern bottled vinegar is labelled, but the recipe gives no target acidity to aim at, so there is nothing to correct it against.
- The brine test'strong enough to float an egg' is the old shorthand for a strong salt brine, in the region of 10 percent salt by weight. It draws water out of the peppers overnight, but it is rinsed away the next morning and contributes nothing to the keeping of the finished pickle.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled iron or steel pan, not stoneware. The point was to keep hot vinegar off bare iron, copper or brass, which discolour the pickle and pit the pan. Stainless steel serves the same purpose now.
- The discarded first vinegarThe first boiling vinegar is poured off and thrown away. The likely purpose is to carry off residual salt and pepper juice that would otherwise leave the keeping liquor weak and cloudy; it also means the peppers enter the second vinegar already carrying water, further diluting it.
- If you want pickled peppersUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar acidity, headspace and processing time. Those numbers are the whole substance of safe pickling and this recipe has none of them.
Pickled sweet peppers belonged to the same autumn work as chow-chow, piccalilli and mangoed melons: a household putting up the last of the garden in vinegar to carry flavour through to spring. The closing line is the giveaway about how they were actually used — chopped into cabbage for "pepper sauce," a cold relish to be kept all winter. The recipe calls for three colours. The instruction to seed the peppers through a single small slit, keeping them whole, is of a piece with the whole stuffed and pickled mangoes and peppers that appear all through late nineteenth-century American cookbooks. The brine-floats-an-egg test is older still, a kitchen hydrometer used long before anyone in a domestic kitchen owned a thermometer, let alone a means of measuring acidity.