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Small Cucumber Pickles
Wash and wipe carefully a hundred tiny cucumbers, place them in jars. Put sufficient water in a porcelain-lined kettle to cover the cucumbers. When the water is boiling hot stir in enough salt to make a brine that will bear an egg. Pour this boiling brine over the cucumbers. Let them stand twenty-four hours, then take them out, wipe each carefully without bruising, place them in clean jars. Put sufficient vinegar in a porcelain kettle to cover them, add one onion sliced, twelve whole cloves, one ounce of mustard seed, three blades of mace. Let these come to boiling point, pour over the pickles, add two tablespoon fuls of chopped horse-radish, stand aside to cool. They will be ready to use in two weeks and will keep all winter. 100 small cucumbers,
This is an open-kettle pickle of the kind that filled nineteenth-century cellar shelves, and it is worth reading for what it tells you about period practice rather than following. The notes below explain the archaic language and then the specific reasons this method does not meet current preserving standards.
- Why this one failsNothing here is measured in a way that can be verified: the vinegar has no stated acidity, the brine is gauged by whether an egg floats, the jars are not sterilised or processed, and the finished pack is stored at cellar temperature for months. Modern pickling standards depend on a known acid concentration (5 percent vinegar) and a timed boiling-water process precisely because none of those variables can be judged by eye.
- Vinegar strength is the missing numberHousehold vinegar of the period varied widely in strength, and cider vinegar drawn from a barrel could be well under 4 percent acetic acid. Safety in a raw-packed vegetable pickle rests entirely on the finished pH, and this recipe gives no way to know it. Use a current tested recipe if you want small cucumber pickles.
- Open-kettle packingPouring hot liquid over cold cucumbers in a jar and standing it aside to cool was standard practice for generations, but it does not reliably heat the contents through, drive out air, or produce a verified vacuum seal. Recontamination between the salt stage and the vinegar stage — the cucumbers are handled and wiped individually — is built into the method.
- "A brine that will bear an egg"The old test for a strong salt solution: a fresh egg floats with a coin-sized patch of shell showing at roughly 10 percent salt by weight, though the reading shifts with the age of the egg and the temperature of the water. It is a rough gauge, and its imprecision is part of the problem here.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy aril that grows around the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece of it, not a spoonful of the ground spice. Whole blades were preferred in pickling liquor because they perfume without clouding.
- Porcelain-lined kettleEnamelled cast iron or, in this period, a tinned or porcelain-glazed pot. The insistence is chemical rather than fussy: hot vinegar and salt brine attack bare iron and copper, discolouring the pickles and picking up metallic flavour.
- ScaleA hundred small cucumbers is a farmhouse quantity, a gallon or two of finished pickles laid down against a winter of limited fresh vegetables. Household books of the period often assume a cellar, a large family, and an autumn glut.
Cucumber pickling in salt then vinegar is one of the oldest preserving techniques in the English-speaking kitchen, and by the late nineteenth century American household manuals commonly carried several versions: gherkins, mangoes, chow-chow, mustard pickle. The two-stage method here — a heavy salt brine first to draw water out of the cucumbers and firm them, then a spiced vinegar — was standard, and the spicing of cloves, mustard seed, mace and horseradish is the conventional pickling group of the period, with the horseradish believed to help keep the pickles crisp. Such books treated the autumn pickling day as ordinary domestic labour rather than a hobby, and the vagueness about vinegar strength and sealing suggests a method more often learned by demonstration than by measurement.