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To Pickle Lima and String Beans
Lima beans and string beans may be packed in salt precisely like cucumbers; that is, a layer may be put in the bottom of a cask, then a layer of salt, then another layer of beans. The top of the cask should be fixed precisely the same as for salting cucumbers. In winter, when ready to use, wash thoroughly in cold water and soak over night in clear cold water. Then cook the same as fresh vegetables, changing the water once or twice while cooking. To my taste, this way of preserving beans is far better than canning.
Green tomatoes, sliced, may be prepared in precisely the same manner.
The following is a list of vegetables and their season for pickling :- Artichokes-July and August.
Beans-July and August.
Cabbage-September.
Red cabbage-September.
Cauliflower-August and September.
Celery-October and November.
Cucumbers-July to the middle of August.
Martynias-July and August.
Musk-melon and cantaloupe-First to the middle of September.
Nasturtiums-August and September.
This is a dry-salt preservation method for low-acid vegetables, and it is written as a cross-reference rather than a procedure: the salt is never weighed, the crock is never described except by pointing at another page, and nothing is measured or tested. That is why it cannot be followed today.
- No salt ratio is givenSuccessful salt-packing of vegetables depends on holding a known concentration — commonly around 20 to 25 percent salt by weight of vegetable for a true salt cure, or a measured brine for fermentation. "A layer of beans, then a layer of salt" gives no way to know which you have made, and the two behave completely differently.
- Lima beans are the wrong candidateShelled limas are dense, starchy and low in acid, and salt penetrates them slowly and unevenly. Under-salted pockets in an anaerobic crock are the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum can grow and produce toxin. The toxin itself is broken down by a full boil, but the recipe specifies no cooking time or temperature, and a hoped-for boil is not a safety margin.
- The instructions live somewhere else"The top of the cask should be fixed precisely the same as for salting cucumbers" points to a procedure printed elsewhere in the book and not repeated here. What it specifies cannot be judged from this page, so the recipe cannot be assessed for safety as printed.
- Cask and cellarThe method assumes a wooden cask kept somewhere cold through the winter; the recipe itself names no temperature. A modern kitchen at room temperature will run the pack far warmer, which speeds spoilage and changes the microbiology entirely. Use a current, tested recipe from a food-safety authority if you want to salt or ferment vegetables.
- Terms in the pickling listMartynias are the young seed pods of the devil's claw plant, once grown for pickling and now rarely seen. "Nasturtiums" in a pickling list usually means the green seed pods, pickled as a caper substitute, though buds and flowers were pickled too. Musk-melon and cantaloupe are listed separately here, though in American usage the two names largely overlapped.
Salting down was the ordinary way to keep vegetables through a northern winter before reliable home canning, and it long outlasted the arrival of the glass jar — the author's aside that salting is "far better than canning" is a real opinion of the period, when early home canning of low-acid vegetables was both laborious and unreliable. Dry-salting works by drawing water out of the vegetable to make its own brine, which either preserves outright at high salt levels or supports a lactic fermentation at lower ones; the winter soaking and repeated changes of cooking water were needed to pull that salt back out again. The pickling calendar at the end is the more useful part of the page today: it is a plain record of what an American kitchen garden yielded month by month, including plants such as martynias and nasturtium pods that have almost entirely dropped out of the vegetable repertoire.