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Standard Recipe for Pickling
3 pts. light brown sugar to 1 qt. vinegar. Add all kinds of whole spice. Steam fruit, then add to spiced vinegar. 4 C vinegar 8 lb. sugar
This is a formula rather than a recipe — a proportion for sweet spiced vinegar that a cook of the period would have applied to whatever fruit was in season. It assumes you already know the method, so most of the work here is filling in what was left unsaid.
- The two ratios disagreeThe first line gives 3 pints sugar to 1 quart vinegar; the trailing note gives 8 lb sugar to 4 cups vinegar, which is roughly three times as sweet. The second figure reads like a scaled batch jotted down separately, and it is genuinely ambiguous which was intended. The 3 pints to 1 quart proportion is the more usual for spiced fruit.
- "Pts." means pints of sugar by volumeSugar was commonly measured by volume as well as by weight. A pint of brown sugar, packed, is about 14 oz, so 3 pints is roughly 2 1/2 lb.
- Whole spice"All kinds" in a pickling context means stick cinnamon, whole cloves, allspice berries, and often blade mace or a little ginger. Use them whole and tied in cheesecloth, or the syrup turns muddy and dark; ground spice will cloud it permanently.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod vinegar, much of it home-made cider vinegar, varied in strength. Use a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — cider vinegar for peaches and pears, white for light-coloured fruit you want to keep pale.
- Steam, don't boilThe instruction to steam the fruit first is the hinge. Fruit dropped straight into hot sugar syrup shrivels and toughens as the sugar draws out water; steaming until just barely tender, then adding it to the spiced vinegar, keeps the pieces whole. Firm fruit — peaches, seckel pears, crabapples, plums — holds up; berries do not.
- The syrup will be thin at firstA common period practice with spiced fruit was to let the fruit stand in the syrup overnight, drain the syrup off, boil it down, and pour it back, repeating over two or three days until it thickened. The recipe gives no such instruction.
- StorageNothing here tells you how to seal or keep it. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle, good for several weeks in clean covered jars. For shelf-stable sealed jars, follow a current tested water-bath procedure for spiced fruit rather than this outline.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A quart of vinegar with the sugar makes enough syrup for several pounds of prepared fruit; the finished quantity depends on the fruit used.
Sweet spiced fruit in vinegar was one of the staples of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American larder thether sharp, sugary counterweight to a plate of roast pork or cold ham, in the same family as pickled peaches, spiced currants and cinnamon crabapples. The recipe as it survives shows the gaps typical of such cookery writing: it gives the proportion, which is the part that is easy to forget, and leaves out the steaming times and the three-day boiling-down that every reader was assumed to know. The heading "standard" may well mean nothing more than a household's default proportion, and the stray second set of figures at the end has the look of a marginal note that found its way into print unedited.