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Lazy Daisy Pickles
1 gal. vinegar 1 cup salt 1 cup sugar 12 small hot red peppers 1 cup mustard seed 2 gals. cucumbers, 1 1/2 to 2 ins. long Wash cucumbers carefully and pack them in clean glass jars. Mix salt, sugar, mustard and peppers with the vinegar, fill the jars to overflowing with it. Cover tightly, store in cool dry place, and the pickles will be ready to eat in two weeks. These make very nice gifts if packed into small narrow jars.
This is a raw-pack, unprocessed pickle: cucumbers go into jars cold, a cold brine is poured over, and the jars are set aside at room temperature for two weeks. That method sits outside every current guideline for shelf-stable pickling, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- No heat processing at any stageNothing here is boiled, and the filled jars are never held in a boiling-water bath. Lids sealed onto cold, unprocessed jars do not produce a reliable vacuum seal, and the contents are left to stand for two weeks in nothing more controlled than a "cool dry place." A current tested recipe with a specified boiling-water process time should be used instead.
- The finished acidity is unknownOne gallon of vinegar is poured over two gallons of cucumbers. Cucumbers are roughly 95 percent water, and that water leaches into the brine over the two-week cure, diluting it substantially. Whether the equilibrium pH lands safely below 4.6 depends on the strength of the vinegar and the exact packing density, and the recipe measures neither.
- Vinegar strength was not standardisedHousehold vinegar has not always been of uniform strength, and older recipes cannot be assumed to have used a 5 percent product. Modern safe pickling requires vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity, stated on the label. The recipe gives no type and no strength.
- Whole small cucumbers are the hardest caseUncut cucumbers 1 1/2 to 2 inches long take up brine slowly through the skin, so the interior stays closer to neutral pH for some days. A low-acid, low-oxygen interior is the sort of environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a concern, and it is one reason current guidance calls for a tested process time rather than an unprocessed raw pack.
- The salt is not a preservative hereOne cup of salt across a gallon of vinegar and two gallons of cucumbers gives only a light brine once it equilibrates, well below the concentrations used for salt curing. Genuine salt-cured fermented pickles run far higher and are held under brine with the fermentation monitored. This recipe relies on the vinegar, and the vinegar is not measured for strength.
- Gifting compounds the problemThe suggestion to pack these into small jars as presents means the jars leave the maker's control entirely. Storage conditions, handling and the length of time before opening all become unknown, and there is no processing step to fall back on.
- A note on the ingredients themselvesMustard seed and small hot red peppers are still sold much as described; a gallon is 16 cups and a cup of mustard seed is roughly 6 ounces by weight. The failure here is the method, not the pantry list.
"Lazy Daisy" turns up as a name in mid-century American home cooking for dishes that skip a tedious step, best known from the Lazy Daisy oatmeal cake with its broiled coconut topping. Applied to pickles, the name is generally read as advertising what the recipe does not ask for -- no scalding, no crock, no fussing with a hot-water bath -- though the origin of the name is not documented. Traditional cucumber pickling in the United States ran along two main lines, the long salt-brine ferment kept in a stoneware crock and the quick vinegar pack, and recipes of this third, informal sort -- raw cucumbers simply covered with a spiced vinegar and left to stand -- circulated widely through church and club cookbooks. The USDA had published home-canning guidance since the First World War, but community cookbooks of this kind passed recipes hand to hand largely untouched by it, and safe practice caught up with the printed page only gradually.