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To Salt Cucumbers for Pickling (Evening I have known)
the evening. I have known the cutting of cucumbers at midday to entirely ruin the vines. When twenty-five or thirty small cucumbers are packed, add a half pint of water to moisten the salt; this, with the juice of the cucumbers that exudes, will make sufficient brine. If you wish to add a new supply of cucumbers each day to the cask, simply remove the board and stone and arrange in layers as directed. After the cask is filled, put a thick layer of horse-radish tops underneath the board, then cover the cask with a cloth, tucking it down tightly around the edge. In the winter when the cucumbers are wanted for pickling, carefully lift the cloth with the scum, wash the board, stone and cloth in clear warm water. Do not be alarmed at the heavy scum you may find on top, as this will not injure the cucumbers. Take out as many cucumbers as are wanted, wipe down the sides of the cask, return the board, stone and cloth. Cover closely as before. Put the cucumbers taken out in a large vessel of cold water and soak three days, changing the water each day. At the end of this time drain and wipe each cucumber carefully without bruising. If you have cabbage leaves at hand add three or four good-sized leaves to the pickles while soaking. Put into a porcelain-lined kettle a sufficient quantity of vinegar to cover the cucumbers; stand it over the fire. If you wish the pickles crisp at the expense of health, add a piece of alum the size of a hazel-hut. Let the whole come to a boil; turn the cucumbers several times with a wooden spoon or those at the bottom will become soft and lose their crispness. The cucumbers, understand, must not be cooked, but simply made crisp by the heating vinegar. The moment it begins to steam or simmer take from the fire, drain the cucumbers and put them in a stone jar. Throw this vinegar away. Cover the cucumbers with fresh, cold vinegar; spices may be added according to taste. A tablespoonful of chopped horse-radish will prevent molding. They will be ready for use in about one week.
This is the second half of a two-part method: a long salt cure in an open cask, followed months later by a vinegar finish. The page as printed begins mid-sentence, and the part that carried the salt quantities is not on it — which is the heart of the problem.
- The salt ratio is missingEverything that made this cure safe — how much salt per layer, per cask, per hundred cucumbers — was on the preceding page. What survives here adds only "a half pint of water to moisten the salt." A salt cure held for months at cellar temperature depends entirely on brine strength; without a measured concentration there is nothing to judge the batch against.
- No temperature is given anywhereThe cask sits from cucumber season until winter with no stated storage temperature, and the page never says where it is kept. A cool cellar is the usual assumption for casks of this kind, but the text does not say so. An unmeasured brine held at room temperature is a different preservation problem from the one the author was describing.
- "Do not be alarmed at the heavy scum"Surface growth of this kind on open crocks was routine, and what the author describes is probably a harmless yeast film. But the instruction as printed asks the reader to accept any surface growth without distinguishing it from mold, and gives no way to tell a sound cask from a spoiled one. That judgement call is the one place a modern reader has no guidance at all.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard crisping agent for pickles and the author flags it herself — "crisp at the expense of health." It is no longer used in home pickling; calcium chloride and tannin-bearing leaves have replaced it, and the USDA has recommended against alum in fermented pickles for decades.
- The finished jar is not shelf-stable as describedThe cucumbers go into a stone jar under fresh cold vinegar with no seal, no processing and no stated acidity. Nineteenth-century vinegar varied widely in strength; today's 5% is a known quantity, but nothing in the text pins it down. If you want salt-cured or fermented pickles, work from a current tested recipe with weighed salt and a measured brine percentage.
- Vocabulary, for reading the textThe board and stone are the follower and weight that hold the cucumbers under brine. Horse-radish tops are the leaves, used here for their reputation as a mold check — the same role the grape, oak or cherry leaves play in later recipes. A gill, if it appears in the missing portion, is half a cup.
- What the author gets rightThe cucumbers must not cook in the vinegar — the moment it steams, they come off the heat, or they go soft; that instruction is sound craft. The first vinegar is discarded, though the author does not say why; the usual explanation is that it has drawn salt and water out of the cucumbers and is now too weak to keep them.
Salting down cucumbers in a cask was the ordinary way an American household kept a summer glut of cucumbers through to spring, and the two-stage method — salt cure first, vinegar finish months later on demand — is well attested in nineteenth-century household books. The cook was not making pickles in August; she was making raw material, then converting a few quarts at a time as they were wanted. The three-day soak in changed water is desalting, not cleaning, and the whole apparatus of board, stone and cloth exists to keep the vegetables below the brine where air cannot reach them. The aside about cutting cucumbers in the evening reflects the common garden belief that handling vines in the midday heat damaged them; it is traditional lore rather than anything the author demonstrates. The frank warning that alum buys crispness "at the expense of health" is a small sign of the period's growing unease about pickle adulterants, which by the 1880s and 1890s had become a regular subject in domestic writing.