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Dill Pickles (C vinegar For a Quart Jar Soak)
1 T salt 2 C water ! 1 C vinegar For a 2-Quart Jar Soak cucumbers in cold water 4 or 5 hours. Pack cucumbers with dill, whole peppers and mustard seed, and alum size of a pea. Boil above mixture and pour over pickles hot; seal. 1/2 pk. green tomatoes 1 large head cabbage 2 green peppers
This entry is a fragment: the brine is incomplete, the method is open-kettle canning, and the last three lines belong to a different recipe entirely. It cannot be followed safely as printed.
- The brine is missingOnly "1 C vinegar" survives. There is no water, no salt, and no indication of the vinegar's acidity — the three things that determine whether a cucumber pickle is acidic enough to be shelf-stable. Guessing at them is exactly what makes home pickling dangerous.
- Open-kettle sealing is obsoletePouring hot liquid over raw cucumbers in a jar and sealing does not heat the jar contents to a temperature that destroys spoilage organisms, and the vacuum it forms is unreliable. Contemporary practice calls for a measured brine and a timed boiling-water bath; nothing here specifies either.
- Cucumbers are a low-acid vegetableUnpickled cucumbers sit well above pH 4.6. An underacidified, sealed, room-temperature jar of them is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which may give no smell, no gas and no visible sign in a jar of pickles.
- AlumPotassium alum was once added "size of a pea" to firm pickles. It is no longer recommended for the purpose: it contributes nothing to safety, can leave a bitter astringency, and in quantity is a gastrointestinal irritant. Modern crispness comes from fresh cucumbers, trimmed blossom ends and adequate chilling.
- The stray lines"1/2 pk. green tomatoes / 1 large head cabbage / 2 green peppers" reads as the beginning of an ingredient list for another recipe, probably a relish or chow-chow, that has ended up attached to this one. Half a peck of green tomatoes is roughly 6 to 7 lb. It has nothing to do with the dill pickles above.
- If you want dill picklesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation source that gives vinegar strength, salt weight, headspace and a processing time. Refrigerator dills, which are never sealed for storage, are the other reasonable route.
This page was compiled from members' handwritten cards, and it shows what that process cost: a title that is really the first line of the ingredient list, a brine with most of its parts lost, and the beginning of the next contributor's relish tacked on the end. Dill pickles of this type — cucumbers soaked in cold water to firm them, packed with dill heads, whole peppers and mustard seed, then covered with hot vinegar — were a standard late-summer job, done in quantity when the cucumber vines came in all at once. Alum for crispness was widespread advice in American canning literature well into the twentieth century and was gradually dropped as extension services standardised pickling instructions; the open-kettle method the recipe assumes was likewise common in home kitchens before boiling-water processing times became the published rule.