Gherkins, Pickled
INGREDIENTS.-Salt and water, 1½ oz. of bruised ginger, oz. of whole black pepper, oz. of whole black spice, 4 cloves, 2 blades of mace, a little horseradish. This proportion of pepper, spices, &c., for 1 quart of vinegar.
Let the gherkins remain in salt and water for 3 or 4 days, when take them out, wipe perfectly dry, and put them into a stone jar. Boil sufficient vinegar to cover them, with spices and pepper, &c., in the above proportion, for 10 minutes; pour it, quite boiling, over the gherkins, cover the jar GHERKINS. with vine-leaves, and put over them a plate, setting them near the fire, where they must remain all night. Next day drain off the vinegar, boil it up again, and pour it hot over them. Cover up with fresh leaves, and let the whole remain till quite cold. Now tie down closely with bladder to exclude the air, and in a month or two they will be fit for use.
TIME.-4 days.
GINGER, APPLE. and salt, and pour in the gravy (which should be strained) that the giblets were stewed in ; cover with a plain crust, ornament and glaze it, and bake for rather more than 1½ hour in a brisk oven. Cover a piece of paper over the pie, to prevent the crust taking too much colour.
TIME.-1 hour to stew the giblets, about 1 hour to bake the pie.
A straightforward hot-vinegar pickle of the kind every Victorian household put up in late summer. The method is sound, but several of the ingredient names and the sealing technique need translating.
- The quantities are incompleteOnly the ginger is given a definite weight (1 oz). The fractions before the pepper and the "black spice" have dropped out of this printing. Half an ounce of each, with the 4 cloves, 2 blades of mace and a knob of horseradish to a quart of vinegar, is a reasonable reconstruction.
- "Black spice"Probably allspice (pimento berries), listed in nineteenth-century pickle recipes as allspice or Jamaica pepper; the wording here may simply be a misprint. Use whole berries, not ground.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer coat of the nutmeg; a "blade" is one dried piece, roughly a teaspoon of the broken fragments sold today. Ground mace will cloud the vinegar.
- The brining stepNo strength is given for the salt and water. About 1 cup of pickling salt to 4 pints of water is one workable proportion. It draws water out of the cucumbers so they stay firm; skipping it gives limp pickles.
- Vinegar strength mattersUse ordinary malt or cider vinegar at 5 per cent acidity, undiluted. Diluting it, or substituting a low-acid wine vinegar, is what turns a keeping pickle into a spoiling one.
- Vine leavesUsually explained by their tannin, which helps keep the gherkins crisp; they were also associated with greening the pickles. Blackcurrant, oak, horseradish or bay leaves are often substituted.
- SealingBladder was a wet membrane tied over the jar mouth and left to dry taut and airtight. Modern practice is a sterilised jar with a vinegar-proof lid; store the sealed jar in the refrigerator rather than in a warm larder, since this recipe involves no heat processing.
- TimingsThe stated "TIME.-4 days" covers only the brining. Add the two hot-vinegar pourings on consecutive days, then the month or two of maturing before the gherkins are worth eating.
Gherkins are simply small pickling cucumbers, the name generally traced to Dutch. By Mrs Beeton's day a well-stocked store cupboard was expected to hold a range of pickles, and the pickle chapter of the Book of Household Management runs to walnuts, onions, red cabbage, nasturtiums and mushrooms alongside these. The twice-boiled vinegar here is a standard Victorian technique. It is worth noting what this recipe does not do. Many commercial and some domestic picklers of the period greened their gherkins by heating them in copper pans, or worse, adding copper salts outright, a practice Beeton and other writers of the period condemned as poisonous. The dull olive gherkin was the honest one.