Cucumbers, Pickled
INGREDIENTS.-1 oz. of whole pepper, 1 oz. of bruised ginger, sufficient vinegar to cover the cucumbers.
Cut the cucumbers in thick slices, sprinkle salt over them, and let them remain for 24 hours. The next day, drain them well for 6 hours, put them into a jar, pour boiling vinegar over them, and keep them in a warm place. In a short time, boil up the vinegar again, add pepper and ginger in the above proportion, and stantly cover them up. Tie them down with bladder, and in a few days they will be fit for use. and in-
A plain English vinegar pickle of the type that filled Victorian larders, written with the assumption that you know what a jar of vinegar looks like and roughly how much you need. A few of the assumptions no longer hold.
- The salting is the whole recipeTwenty-four hours in salt followed by six hours' draining pulls out the water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar and turn the pickle soft and cloudy. Cutting this short is the commonest way the pickle fails. Use about 1 tablespoon of coarse salt per pound of sliced cucumber and drain in a colander, not a bowl.
- Choose the right cucumberBeeton almost certainly has in mind the ridge cucumber of an English kitchen garden: small, firm, thick-skinned, though the recipe does not say so. Long modern greenhouse or seedless cucumbers are mostly water and will collapse. Use pickling or Kirby cucumbers, cut in thick slices — about half an inch.
- Vinegar strength matters"Sufficient vinegar" means enough to cover by an inch or so once the slices have settled, and it should be at least 5 per cent acetic acid — ordinary malt, cider or distilled vinegar all qualify. Do not dilute it, and do not reuse vinegar from another pickle jar.
- Whole pepper and bruised gingerWhole pepper here means unground peppercorns. Bruised ginger is dried root ginger cracked with the flat of a knife or a rolling pin so the flavour leaches out; fresh ginger is not the same ingredient. An ounce of each is a generous amount of spice, but the recipe specifies no weight of cucumber to match it, so scale by eye.
- "Keep them in a warm place"This holds the vinegar hot for longer so it penetrates the slices. The recipe says only 'in a short time' before the second boiling, so a warm kitchen corner for a few hours rather than days at room temperature is the likely sense.
- The second boilingPouring off, reboiling and returning the vinegar with the spices firms the cucumber and drives the spice flavour in. The recipe says only to do it 'in a short time' after the first pour, and to pour it back boiling hot, covering the jar instantly.
- Bladder is now a lidA dried pig's bladder tied over the mouth of the jar was the usual cover for preserves of this date. Use a glass jar with a plastic-coated or plastic lid; bare metal corrodes in vinegar vapour and taints the pickle.
- StorageThis is a fresh-pack pickle, not a heat-processed preserve. Once it is cool and covered, keep it in the refrigerator and eat it within a couple of months; discard any jar that grows mould, smells yeasty or goes slippery.
Pickled cucumbers appear in English household books from the seventeenth century onward, and Beeton's version is about as bare as they come: salt, vinegar, pepper, ginger. Black pepper and dried ginger were among the cheaper keeping spices of the Victorian grocer's shop, and turn up in pickles of many kinds. What the recipe assumes without saying is a household with a garden or a greengrocer supplying cucumbers in a glut, and a cook whose job was to convert that glut into something that would keep. The pig's bladder tied over the jar mouth, mentioned here as though everyone had a drawer of them, was standard sealing equipment before cheap screw-top glass; it was soaked soft, stretched over the rim, tied, and shrank tight as it dried.