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Sunshine Pickles
25 cucmbers, med. size 10 small onions Cut both ¼ in. thick and salt 1½ hours. Drain and make syrup as follows: 1½ qt. rather weak vinegar.
Mrs. John Dollenmaier, Mrs. Geo. Wright.
Mrs. Gertrude Wolf. 2 C sugar 1 t celery seed ½ t ground pepper ½ t ginger 1 t mustard seed 1 t tumeric Put pickles in and boil 30 minutes and seal hot.
Mrs. V. L. Gerred, Mrs. John Dollenmaier, Alma Timmerman. 8 C sugar 4 C vinegar
This is a bread-and-butter style cucumber pickle of the kind that filled church-supper cookbooks a century ago, but the preserving method and the vinegar specification are both outside what is considered sound practice now.
- Why it fails: undefined acidityThe syrup calls for "rather weak vinegar," which gives no acetic acid percentage at all. Cucumbers and onions are low-acid vegetables, and the safety of any shelf-stable pickle depends entirely on the finished acidity being reliably below pH 4.6. A vinegar of unknown and deliberately reduced strength cannot be assumed to get there.
- Why it fails: open-kettle sealing"Seal hot" means ladling boiling pickles into jars and closing them, trusting the cooling contents to pull a vacuum. That was standard in 1900 and is no longer accepted: the jar contents are not heated after the lid goes on, the seal is unreliable, and any organism introduced during filling is undisturbed. Current guidance is a timed boiling-water process for all pickles.
- What to do insteadIf you want this flavour profile, use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, or make the same spiced syrup as a refrigerator pickle to be eaten within a few weeks and never sealed for the pantry.
- Reading the spice listCelery seed, mustard seed and turmeric are a teaspoon each, with half a teaspoon each of ground pepper and ginger, against two cups of sugar. The turmeric is doing colour work as much as flavour, and turmeric is what gives commercial bread-and-butter pickles their yellow.
- The salting stepSlicing thin and salting for an hour and a half draws water out of the cucumbers so the slices stay firm rather than going flabby in syrup. It is the one part of the technique that has not changed.
- Thirty minutes of boilingEven setting aside the sealing question, half an hour at a boil is far longer than modern pickling practice allows for thin cucumber slices. Contemporary recipes generally bring the slices only to a simmer in the syrup and pack them promptly; long boiling of thin slices tends to give a soft, dulled pickle.
- ScaleTwenty-five medium cucumbers and ten onions is a substantial batch; the recipe states no yield, but it is plainly community-cookbook quantity, meant for a cellar shelf rather than a household week.
Church and society cookbooks like this one were commonly compiled by subscription: each contributor sent in a family standby, and the committee set them in type more or less as received, which is why several names often sit against a single formula. "Sunshine" pickles appear under that name in American community books of the early twentieth century; here the name attaches to a bright turmeric-yellow sweet-sour cucumber slice, though elsewhere the term is used for pickles cured in the sun, so it should not be taken as denoting a single thing. The nearest modern equivalent is what is usually called bread-and-butter pickle, a name generally dated to the 1920s. The heavy sugar, the celery and mustard seed, and the turmeric are a familiar Midwestern signature, and the assumption that a cook has twenty-five cucumbers coming ripe at once points to a household kitchen garden.