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Pickling (This branch of domestic)
This branch of domestic economy comprises a great variety of articles, which are essentially necessary to the convenience of families. It is at the same time too prevalent a practice to make use of brass utensils to give pickle a fine color. This pernicious custom is easily avoided by heating the liquor and keeping it in a proper degree of warmth before it is poured upon the pickle. Stone jars are the best adapted for sound keeping. Pickles should never be handled with the fingers, but by a spoon kept for the purpose.
To Pickle-Onions.
Put a sufficient quantity into salt and water for nine days, observing to change the water every day; next put them into jars and pour fresh boiling salt and water over them; cover them close up till they are cold; then make a second decoction of salt and water, and pour it on boiling. When it is cold drain the onions on a hair sieve, and put them into wide-mouthed bottles; fill them up with distilled vinegar; put into every bottle a slice or two of ginger, a blade of mace and a teaspoonful of sweet oil, which will keep the onions white. Cork them up in a dry place.
To make Sour Krout.
Take a large, strong, wooden vessel or cask resembling a salt-beef cask, and capable of containing as much as is sufficient for the winter's consumption of a family. Gradually break down or chop the cabbages (deprived of outside green leaves) into very small pieces; begin with one or two cabbages at the bottom of the cask, and add others at intervals, pressing them by means of a wooden spade against the side of the cask until it is full. Then place a heavy weight upon the top of it, and allow it to stand near to a warm place for four or five days. By this time it will have undergone fermentation, and be ready for use.
Whilst the cabbages are passing through the process of fermentation, a very disagreeable, fetid, acid smell is exhaled from them; now remove the cask to a cool situation, and keep it always covered up. Strew aniseeds among the layers of the cabbages during its preparation, which communicates a peculiar flavor to the saur kraut at an after period.
In boiling it for the table, two hours is the period for it to be on the fire. It forms an excellent nutritious and antiscorbutic food for winter use.
Piccalilli-Indian method.
This consists of all kinds of pickles mixed and put into one large jar-sliced cucumbers, button onions, cauliflowers, broken in pieces. Salt them, or put them in a large hair sieve in the sun to dry for three days, then scald them in vinegar a few minutes; when cold put them together. Cut a large white cabbage in quarters, with the outside leaves taken off and cat fine; salt it, and put it in the sun to dry three or four days; then scald it in vinegar, the same as cauliflower; carrots, three parts, boiled in vinegar and a little bay salt.
French beans, reddish pods, and nasturtiums all go through the same process as capsicums, etc.
To 1 gallon of vinegar put 4 ounces of ginger bruised, 2 ounces of whole white pepper, 2 ounces of allspice, 1/2 ounce chillies bruised, 4 ounces of turmeric, 1 pound of the best mustard, 1/2 pound of shallots, 1 ounce of garlic, and 1/2 pound of bay salt. The vinegar, spice, and other ingredients, except the mustard, must boil half an hour; then strain it into a pan, put the mustard into a large basin, with a little vinegar; mix it quite fine and free from lumps, then add more. When well mixed put it into the vinegar just strained off, and when quite cold put the pickles into a large pan, and the liquor over them; stir them repeatedly, so as to mix them all. Finally, put them into a jar, and tie them over first with a bladder, and afterwards with leather. The capsicums want no preparation.
To Pickle Samphire.
Put the quantity wanted into a clean pan, throw over it two or three handsful of salt, and cover it with spring-water twenty-four hours; next put it into a clean saucepan, throw in a handful of salt, and cover it with good vinegar.
Close the pan tight, set it over a slow fire, and let it stand till the samphire is green and crisp, then take it off instantly, for should it remain till it is soft it will be totally spoiled. Put it into the pickling-pot and cover it close; when it is quite cold tie it down with a bladder and leather, and set it by for use. Samphire may be preserved all the year by keeping it in a very strong brine of salt and water; and just before using it put it for a few minutes into some of the best vinegar.
Mushrooms.
Put the smallest that can be got into springwater, and rub them with a piece of new flannel dipped in salt. Throw them into cold water as they are cleaned, which will make them keep their color; next put them into a saucepan with a handful of salt upon them. Cover them close, and set them over the fire four or five minutes, or till the heat draws the liquor from them; next lay them betwixt two dry cloths till they are cold; put them into glass bottles, and fill them up with distilled vinegar, with a blade of mace and a teaspoonful of sweet oil into every bottle; cork them up close and set them in a dry cool place. As a substitute for distilled vinegar, use white wine vinegar, or ale. Alegar will do, but it must be boiled with a little mace, salt, and a few slices of ginger, and it must be quite cold before it is poured upon the mushrooms.
Another Method.
This is a cluster of preserving instructions rather than a single dish, and several of them fall outside what can be done safely today. The notes below explain the specific failures, along with the vocabulary needed to read the page.
- Sauerkraut with no saltThe kraut instruction never calls for salt at all — only shredded cabbage, pressure from a weight, aniseed, and four or five days near warmth. Salt at a measured concentration is what suppresses spoilage organisms while lactic acid bacteria take hold; without it, and at an unstated warm temperature, the cask is as likely to putrefy as to ferment. The "very disagreeable, fetid, acid smell" the author describes as normal is not what a sound ferment smells like.
- Mushrooms under oilSmall mushrooms are heated only four or five minutes, bottled, filled up with distilled vinegar, and given a teaspoonful of sweet oil in each bottle. The oil forms a film rather than a true seal, and the vinegar does acidify the pack, but no acidity is measured anywhere in the method and mushrooms are a low-acid vegetable, so a corked bottle of this kind carries a genuine risk of Clostridium botulinum. The same teaspoonful of oil is added to the onions.
- Sealed with bladder and leatherPickles "tied over first with a bladder, and afterwards with leather" are covered, not sealed. Nothing in the piccalilli or samphire method reaches a processing temperature or holds it for a measured time, so keeping quality depends entirely on the acidity of the vinegar — which is never specified. Use a current tested recipe with stated vinegar strength and processing times.
- Brass and verdigrisThe opening warning is real and worth understanding. Cooks deliberately pickled in brass or copper because the acid attacked the metal and threw a bright green tint into the liquor; the green was copper salts, and the practice poisoned people. Mackenzie's alternative — warm the liquor and pour it hot — was the respectable advice of the period.
- SamphireRock samphire (Crithmum maritimum) and marsh samphire or glasswort were both sold under the name and both were gathered wild from cliffs and saltings. Neither is a supermarket item in most places, and cliff-gathered rock samphire has its own hazards quite apart from the pickle.
- Vinegar wordsDistilled vinegar is colourless spirit vinegar, chosen here because it will not stain the onions or mushrooms. Alegar is vinegar soured from ale rather than wine — malt vinegar, in effect, and much darker. Bay salt is coarse sea salt evaporated in shallow pans, not a herb.
- Missing fractions in the piccalilliMissing quantities in the piccalilli -- The spice list has lost several figures in printing: "ounce chillies bruised," "pound of shallots" and "pound of bay salt" all lack the number or fraction that must once have stood before them. Anyone reading the proportions should treat them as incomplete rather than guess at them.
- Two hours for the krautThe page directs two hours on the fire. Long boiling of sauerkraut was usual in period cookery and would have softened coarsely cut cabbage and driven off some of its sourness, though the recipe gives no reason of its own. It is not a timing modern practice supports for texture or flavour.
Pickling occupied a whole department of the nineteenth-century household because it answered a real problem: how a family ate vegetables between one growing season and the next. The sauerkraut entry says so outright, calling it "an excellent nutritious and antiscorbutic food for winter use" — antiscorbutic meaning scurvy-preventing, a phrase that had entered domestic writing from naval provisioning, where the connection between preserved vegetables and healthy crews had been argued over since the eighteenth century. Piccalilli's "Indian method" heading points to a different current: the mustard-and-turmeric mixed pickle is generally traced to British attempts to reproduce the achars encountered in India, and the turmeric that gives the jar its yellow was doing in this recipe exactly what the brass pan did illicitly in others, supplying colour. Mackenzie's Ten Thousand Receipts was a compilation, assembled from earlier printed sources rather than tested in one kitchen, which is why the section reads as a run of separate authorities laid end to end — one careful about verdigris, another vague to the point of danger about salt.