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Sweet Cucumber Pickle
Soak the cucumbers in a brine for two weeks; drain, and slice lengthwise. Cook in a syrup made by cooking six pounds sugar and four quarts of vinegar; boil twenty minutes. Keep in tightly covered crock.
Pickled Cucumber No. I 100 small cucumbers 2 pints salt 1 quart small peppers 8 quarts water Boil water and salt together; pour over cucumbers and peppers. Let stand over night, in the morning drain. Make a new brine, using same proportion; repeat this process twice, then drain and wash in cold water. Place cucumbers and peppers in crock; cover with boiling vinegar.
Twelve whole cloves and twelve peppercorns may be tied in a bag and kept in the pickle jar.
Two related recipes run together here: a sweet syrup pickle and a salt-brined sour pickle. Both belong to an era when a stone crock in a cold cellar was the only storage available, and both leave out the numbers that make brining and long keeping predictable.
- The brine is unmeasuredThe sweet pickle simply says "soak the cucumbers in a brine for two weeks." A two-week ambient soak is a fermentation, and whether it ferments safely or spoils depends entirely on salt concentration, which is never given. The second recipe's proportion (2 pints salt to 8 quarts water) is not stated to apply to the first.
- Nothing is processed or sealedBoth recipes end with the pickles sitting in a crock; the first says only "tightly covered crock." There is no boiling-water bath, no headspace, no seal, and no stated storage temperature. A covered crock of this kind depended on a cold cellar, which most modern homes cannot supply.
- Vinegar strength is undefinedThe recipe does not say what vinegar to use, and vinegar of the period, often home-produced, varied in acidity. Safe pickling depends on a known acetic acid percentage, and the recipe gives no way to judge it. Hot vinegar poured over cucumbers is further diluted by the water in them, which can drift out of the acid range that keeps a crock safe.
- Use a tested current recipeSweet cucumber pickles and brined dills are both well covered by modern tested procedures with specified salt weights, vinegar acidity and processing times. Use one of those rather than adapting this.
- Scale, for contextSix pounds of sugar to four quarts of vinegar in the first recipe, and 100 cucumbers with a quart of peppers in eight quarts of brine in the second, are quantities for a household putting up a season's supply at once.
- What a crock wasThe vessel intended is a glazed stoneware jar, straight-sided and open-topped; brine crocks were commonly weighted with a plate to hold the vegetables under the liquid, since anything floating above the brine is where spoilage begins.
- "Small peppers"A quart of small peppers in the second recipe most likely means whole hot pods of the cayenne or chili type, added for keeping quality and colour as well as heat.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it pairs its chocolate chapters with a full domestic manual, preserving section included. Cucumber pickling by the hundred was ordinary autumn work in a period when the household, not the grocer, was responsible for getting vegetables through to spring, and the long repeated salting described here is the older method: successive changes of fresh brine to draw water out of the cucumbers and firm them before the vinegar ever touches them. The sweet version, heavy with sugar and cut lengthwise, sits alongside the sour dill tradition often associated with German and Central European immigrants. Whole cloves and peppercorns tied in a bag, rather than loose, would have kept the pickle clear.