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Sweet Pickled Cucumbers (Pare and cut in thick slices)
Pare and cut in thick slices six good sized cucumbers; weigh and to each seven pounds allow four pounds of sugar and one pint of cider vinegar, twelve whole cloves, quarter of an ounce of stick cinnamon, two blades of mace. Put the sugar, vinegar and spices on to boil in a porcelain kettle; add the cucumbers to this, stand them over a very moderate fire, turning them carefully until each piece seems thoroughly cooked but not soft. Stand aside until morning; next day bring them again to a boiling point and stand aside to cool. Do this also the next morning. Then lift the cucumbers carefully, place them in jars; boil the liquor down until the quantity is just sufficient to cover them. Pour this over hot, fasten the jars and stand in a cool, dry place to keep.
This is a three-day sweet pickle of the open-kettle type, and while the vocabulary is easy enough to translate, the preserving method is the part that has not survived. The notes below explain the old terms and then why the sealed jars at the end are the problem.
- Why it fails: acid ratioOne pint of cider vinegar against seven pounds of cucumbers and four pounds of sugar gives no reliable assurance that the finished pickle sits below pH 4.6. Sugar sweetens and firms but does not acidify, and cucumbers themselves are low-acid. A current tested sweet-pickle recipe, with a specified vinegar strength and volume, should be used instead.
- Why it fails: open-kettle sealingFilling jars with hot syrup and fastening the lids was ordinary practice in cookbooks of this period. It does not sterilise the jar interior, the underside of the lid, or the headspace air, and it produces a seal formed by cooling rather than by a measured process. Nothing here specifies a boiling-water bath, a time, or a jar size.
- Why it fails: shelf storageThe instruction is to keep the sealed jars in a cool dry place indefinitely. A low-acid, under-processed, sealed anaerobic jar held at room temperature is the exact set of conditions in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin, and the toxin is not detectable by smell or appearance.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamelled or enamel-lined iron pan. The point was to avoid bare iron, copper or brass, which react with vinegar and can discolour both the syrup and the metal.
- Blades of maceMace is the dried outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed; a blade is one flattened piece. Published equivalents for a blade vary, somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace each, and ground mace loses aroma quickly and behaves differently in a syrup.
- Stick cinnamonA quarter ounce is about 7 g, or two to three average cinnamon quills. Whole spices were used so the syrup stayed clear; ground spice clouds and darkens a sweet pickle.
- The three-day reheatingBringing the fruit to a boil and letting it stand overnight, repeatedly, is a genuine and still-respected technique for sweet pickles and preserves. Each cycle draws sugar deeper into the flesh while keeping the pieces from collapsing, which is why the recipe insists on cooked through but not soft.
- Cucumbers then and nowThe book assumes a thick-skinned, seedy field cucumber that has been pared. Modern thin-skinned salad and English cucumbers hold far less structure and go slack under this kind of repeated heating.
Sweet spiced pickles of this sort sit at the point where preserving meets confectionery: the cloves, stick cinnamon and mace are the same warm spice set used in mincemeat and spiced fruit, and the very heavy proportion of sugar reflects a period when sugar had become cheap enough for domestic preserving on a large scale. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s often gave pickles by the pound rather than the jar, because a household put up its own supply in quantity for the winter, and the slow multi-day method with overnight rests was one common way of keeping the pieces firm. The instruction to use a porcelain kettle is a small piece of period chemistry knowledge, widely repeated in these books, reflecting a concern about vinegar in metal pans. What the recipe does not have is any concept of measured heat processing: reliable home canning guidance with specified times, jar sizes and acid levels came out of extension services and government bulletins later in the twentieth century, and it is exactly that missing framework that puts this method out of use.