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Sweet Pickles
Mrs. H. E. Gaddis.
Wash pickles: 2 C salt to a 3 gal. jar of pickles. Heat this water every day for three days and put back on pickles. After three days, heat pickles in 1 pt. vinegar and 1 t alum and drain. Then to 6 C vinegar add 4 C sugar and whole mixed spices to taste. Bring to boiling point. Fill your jar full of pickles and put the vinegar on them and seal. Mrs. Kruckman.
A church-supper sweet pickle of the brine-then-syrup school, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed her reader already knew the method. Read it as a historical document rather than a working procedure: the finishing step is open-kettle sealing with no measured processing, and the acidity of the finished jar cannot be verified.
- The abbreviationsC is a cup, t a teaspoon, pt a pint. "Whole mixed spices to taste" means the pickling-spice blend sold loose by the pound — mustard seed, coriander, allspice, bay, cinnamon, cloves, dill and chile in varying proportions.
- The scaleA 3-gallon stoneware jar of whole cucumbers is on the order of 15-20 lb of vegetables, well beyond a modern batch. The recipe does not scale cleanly: only the salt is given, never the volume of water it goes into.
- Why it is unsafe as writtenThe jars are filled with hot syrup and sealed with no boiling-water processing and no headspace or time given. Open-kettle canning is no longer considered sound for any product: the seal is unreliable and the jar contents are never held at a verified temperature.
- Unverified aciditySix cups vinegar to four cups sugar plus the water clinging to the cucumbers gives a final acidity nobody has measured, and household vinegar of the period was not reliably standardised at 5 percent. Sweet pickles depend on hitting a target pH; a recipe that cannot be checked against one should not be sealed and stored.
- The room-temperature brine stageThe brine stage -- The cucumbers sit in salt water that is drained, heated and poured back over three days. The water volume is never given, so the salt concentration cannot be worked out; a multi-day hold in an open crock is the sort of condition that favours soft-rot bacteria and surface yeasts.
- AlumPotassium aluminium sulphate was a common crisping agent and was widely sold. It is no longer recommended in pickling: it can contribute a metallic astringency, does little for texture in a properly handled cucumber, and is unnecessary.
- If you want sweet picklesUse a current tested recipe with weighed salt, standardised 5 percent vinegar and a specified boiling-water processing time.
Sweet pickles of this type — a long salt cure, a mordanting bath with alum, then a hot sweet-spiced vinegar — were the backbone of the American pickle shelf from the mid-nineteenth century through the Second World War, and the many-day versions were known generically as seven-day or fourteen-day pickles. The double attribution here, headed by Mrs. H. E. Gaddis and signed by Mrs. Kruckman, is characteristic of church and society cookbooks: recipes were collected from whoever contributed them, and credit sometimes ran to both the submitter and the woman she had it from, which is a fair record of how such formulas actually travelled. The compression is equally typical. The recipe leaves the equipment, the spice mixture, and the sealing unexplained, which is precisely why it now has to be explained.