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Dill Pickles (Mrs Allie T Nicholas C salt)
1 Mrs. Allie T. Nicholas. 1 C salt Dill Soak cucumbers over night in cold water. In morning pack cucumbers in jars with dill between. Let water, vinegar and salt come to a boil and then pour over pickles in cans and seal at once. Mrs. Edith Wells. 1 T salt 2 C water
This entry has come down to us garbled — two contributors' recipes have been run together by the typesetter or the scanner, and the result cannot be followed even by a cook willing to guess. Beyond the missing text, the canning method itself is one that food-safety authorities abandoned decades ago.
- The vinegar quantity is simply absentThe instructions call for water, vinegar and salt boiled together, but no amount of vinegar appears anywhere in the text. Acidity is the entire preservative mechanism in a vinegar pickle, and there is no way to reconstruct it from what survives here.
- Two recipes, one paragraphThe entry carries two contributors' names, "Mrs. Allie T. Nicholas" and "Mrs. Edith Wells", and two incompatible salt measures, 1 C and 1 T, with 2 C water floating loose at the end. The likeliest explanation is that two separate submissions have run together, since one cup of salt and one tablespoon of salt cannot be variants of the same brine; but exactly which fragment belongs to which recipe cannot be recovered.
- Open-kettle sealing"Pour over pickles in cans and seal at once" is the open-kettle method, in which the hot liquid alone is trusted to sterilise the jar and drive out air. It was standard in community cookbooks of this era and is no longer considered safe: it produces weak, unreliable seals and does not heat the contents of the jar through. Current practice is a measured boiling-water bath.
- Low-acid contents in a sealed anaerobic jarCucumbers are low-acid. A sealed jar of under-acidified vegetables held at room temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, which produces a toxin that no amount of tasting or looking will reveal. Without a known vinegar-to-water ratio there is no way to establish that the finished brine is acidic enough to prevent it.
- "Cans" means glass jarsHousehold recipes commonly used "can" and "jar" interchangeably for glass preserving jars, and the closures then in use (typically a zinc or glass lid with a rubber ring) behave differently from modern two-piece lids, which is another reason the sealing instruction does not transfer.
- If you want dill picklesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, brine ratio, headspace and processing time. Those four numbers are precisely what this page has lost.
Community cookbooks of this kind were typically compiled from handwritten cards submitted by contributors and then set in type, which is one way two women's dill pickle recipes could end up welded into a single paragraph with the ingredient lists floating loose. Dill pickling is generally credited to Central and Eastern European immigration for its spread in American kitchens, and books of this sort show two broad families: the fermented crock pickle, soured over weeks by salt brine and wild lactic bacteria, and the quicker vinegar pack seen here, in which boiling brine is poured over raw cucumbers and dill heads. The overnight soak in cold water is a real and still-useful step, meant to firm up cucumbers that may have sat a day or two after picking. The rest of the method reflects an era before home canning was studied systematically; the USDA and state extension services would spend much of the following half-century replacing "seal at once" with measured processing times.