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To Pickle Capsicums
Pick the capsicums just as they are turning red. Make a slit in the sides of each, take out the seeds, throw them into salt and water two days. Drain, put them in glass jars, cover with cold vinegar, cork and stand in a cool place.
They will keep for several years, and as the vinegar is used off cover with fresh vinegar. They may be added to sauces or salads.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle of the old school: no heat anywhere in the process, no measured salt, no measured acid, and a claim of several years' keeping at room temperature. The ingredients are ordinary but the method is outside what can be recommended now, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- Acidity is never measured or controlledPeppers are a low-acid vegetable, and safety in a pickle depends on the finished liquid sitting below pH 4.6 throughout. Whole slit peppers full of water will dilute the vinegar to an unknown degree, and household vinegar of earlier periods varied widely in strength — vinegar sold for pickling today is usually around 5 per cent acetic acid, older household vinegar frequently was not.
- Ambient storage of an unheated, unsealed packA corked jar in a cool place is not a hermetic seal, and nothing in the process reaches a temperature that destroys spores. Low-acid vegetables held anaerobically at room temperature are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum; the toxin may give no smell, taste or other warning sign.
- "Cover with fresh vinegar" reopens the jar repeatedlyTopping up as the liquid is used off introduces air, utensils and dilution again and again over the stated years of keeping. A pickle intended to be shelf-stable for long storage should be filled and sealed once, not repeatedly reopened and topped up.
- The salt stage is not a cure"Salt and water two days" gives no proportion, so the brine could be anywhere from lightly seasoned to saturated. Two days in an unspecified brine draws out moisture but does not preserve the peppers, and it is not a substitute for measured acidification.
- What "capsicums" means hereIn older English usage the word can cover the genus generally, from mild bell types to small hot pods, and the recipe does not say which is meant. Which one is intended changes nothing about the safety problem, but it is worth knowing the recipe is not specifically about sweet peppers.
- If you want pickled peppersUse a current tested pickle recipe with stated vinegar strength, stated salt, a hot pack or refrigerated storage, and a defined shelf life.
Pickling in cold vinegar and storing the jar in the larder was one common household approach long before anyone could measure acidity, and the confidence of "they will keep for several years" reflects a kitchen in which vinegar was regarded as an all-purpose preservative rather than a controlled ingredient. Capsicums reached European and then British and American kitchens from the Americas from the sixteenth century onward, and in manuals of this kind they appear largely as a flavouring, which may lie behind the closing note that the pickled pods go into sauces and salads rather than being served on their own. Picking them as they are turning red is defensible horticultural advice: the pods have reached full size, and the walls are still firm enough to hold their shape once slit and seeded. The scientific understanding that made this class of preserve untenable came later; the organism responsible for botulism was identified in the late nineteenth century, and tested, measured home-canning procedures for low-acid vegetables belong to the twentieth.