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To Salt Cucumbers for Pickling (Choose very small cucumbers)
Choose very small cucumbers and these as free from spots as possible. Put a layer in the bottom of a cask, then a layer of coarse salt, Liverpool is best. The layer of salt should be at least a quarter of an inch thick. On this put another layer of cucumbers, another of salt and so continue until all the cucumbers are used. Place a board on top of the pickles, on which put a heavy stone to keep them down. If you gather the cucumbers from your own garden, do so as early in the morning as possible or late in
This is not a pickle recipe but the first stage of one: the old salt-stock method, in which cucumbers were held in dry salt for months and freshened later before being finished in vinegar. As printed here it gives no ratio, no brine strength and no holding temperature, and the text breaks off mid-sentence, so it cannot be followed safely.
- No measured saltSalt-stock preservation works only because the cucumbers throw off water that dissolves the salt into a near-saturated brine, and everything depends on that brine staying strong enough. "A quarter of an inch" of salt per layer is not a ratio; it varies with cucumber size and how tightly the cask is packed. Commercial salting houses tested brine with a salinometer and added dry salt through the season to hold it.
- No temperature, no timelineThe cucumbers sit in an open cask at whatever the cellar happens to be. Warm weather, a weak brine and cucumbers that float above the liquid are the classic route to soft, hollow, spoiled stock. The original also never says how long to hold them or how to freshen them afterwards, because the page is cut off.
- Why the cautionUnder-salted vegetable curing under a weighted board in a cask can go wrong in ways the printed text gives no way to control. Modern brined-pickle guidance specifies weighed salt, weighed cucumbers and a fully submerged pack for exactly this reason. Use a current tested recipe for brined or fermented cucumbers.
- Liverpool saltLiverpool salt was coarse pan salt shipped through that port from the Cheshire brine works, valued for being clean and cheap. It also lacks the anti-caking agents and iodine in modern table salt, which cloud brine and can darken pickles; canning or pickling salt is the present equivalent.
- A cask, a board and a stoneThe board-and-stone follower is sound thinking and survives in any modern fermentation crock: everything must stay below the surface. What is missing is the instruction to skim the scum that forms and to replace the brine if it weakens, which fuller versions of the method give.
- Picking in the coolThe truncated advice about gathering early or late is real; cucumbers were picked in the cool of the day. The blossom end also carries enzymes that can soften a whole batch, which is why later guidance says to trim it off.
Salt-stock was the backbone of the nineteenth-century pickle trade. Cucumbers ripen over a few weeks in high summer, but demand for pickles runs all year, so growers packed the glut into casks of coarse salt where it would keep for a year or more, then shipped the salted stock to be freshened in repeated changes of water and finished in vinegar, spices or sugar as the market required. Household books like this one seem to echo the commercial practice on a domestic scale, which may be why the instruction begins with a cask rather than a jar. The recommendation of Liverpool salt is a period marker: British pan salt moving through that port reached American kitchens, and cooks distinguished it by name from finer domestic table salt long before iodised salt existed.