Onions, Pickled
1/4 oz. of mace, INGREDIENTS. -1 gallon of pickling onions, salt and water, milk; to each 1/2 gallon of vinegar, 1 oz. of bruised ginger, 1/4 tablespoonful of cayenne, 1 oz. of allspice, 1 oz. of whole black pepper, oz. of whole nutmeg bruised, 8 cloves, oz. of mace.
Gather the onions, which should not be too small, when they are quite dry and ripe; wipe off the dirt, but do not pare them; make a strong solution of salt and water, into which put the onions, and change this morning and night, for 3 days, and save the last brine they were put in.
Then take the outside skin off and put them into a tin saucepan capable of holding them all, as they are always better done together. Now take equal quantities of milk and the last salt and water the onions were in, and pour this to them; to this add 2 large spoonfuls of salt, put them over the fire and watch them very attentively. Keep constantly turning the onions about with a wooden skimmer, those at the bottom to the top and vice versa, and let the milk and water run through the holes of the skimmer. Remember, the onions must never boil, or, if they do, they will be good for nothing; and they should be quite transparent. Keep the onions stirred for a few minutes and, in stirring them, be particular not to break them.
Then have ready a pan with a colander, into which turn the onions to drain, covering them with a cloth to keep in the steam. Place on a table an old cloth, 2 or 3 times double; put the onions on it when quite hot and over them an old piece of blanket; cover this closely over them, to keep in ONIONS, SPANISH. the steam. Let them remain till the next day, when they will be quite cold and look yellow and shrivelled; take off the shrivelled skins, when they should be as white as snow. Put them into a pan, make a pickle of vinegar and the remaining ingredients; boil all these up, and pour hot over the onions in the pan. Cover very closely to keep in all the steam and let them stand till the following day, when they will be quite cold. Put them into jars or bottles well bunged, and a tablespoonful of the best olive-oil on the top of each jar or bottle.
Tie them down with bladder, and let them stand in a cool place for a month or six weeks, when they will be fit for use. They should be beautifully white and eat crisp, without the least softness, and will keep good many months.
SEASONABLE from the middle of July to the end of August.
A long recipe with one make-or-break instruction and several measurements that have gone missing in the typesetting. Read it through before you start, because the timings are spread over four days.
- The hinge: never let the milk boilThe onions are heated in milk and brine only until they turn translucent, which happens well below a simmer. Once it boils the onions soften and collapse, and no amount of vinegar afterwards will bring back the crispness the recipe promises.
- A gallon of onionsAn imperial gallon is 4.5 litres by volume, which is somewhere in the region of 6 lb of pickling onions, depending on their size and how closely they pack; the recipe specifies onions that are "not too small". Halve or quarter the whole recipe freely; the proportions scale without trouble.
- Missing spice weightsTwo entries in the ingredient list have lost their numbers in printing: "oz. of whole nutmeg bruised" and "oz. of mace." Given the other spices are an ounce each per half gallon of vinegar, half an ounce of each is a reasonable reading, but the original is genuinely incomplete here.
- Strength of the brine"A strong solution of salt and water" is not defined in the recipe. The often-repeated rule of thumb is a brine strong enough to float a fresh egg, which is somewhere around 10 per cent salt by weight, or roughly 100 g salt per litre of water.
- Vinegar acidityUse a vinegar labelled at 5 per cent acetic acid or higher. Malt vinegar is the traditional choice for British pickled onions; some artisan vinegars run weaker, and weak vinegar is what makes a pickle go soft and cloudy.
- The tin saucepanA tinned pan meant a non-reactive surface. Use stainless steel or enamel for both the milk stage and the boiling vinegar; bare aluminium, iron and copper will discolour the onions and pick up a metallic taste from the acid.
- The milk-and-blanket stageDraining the hot onions and wrapping them in cloth overnight is a warm, slow cool-down with dairy residue on them. Drain them well and let them cool in a cool, airy place rather than insulated; the subsequent hot vinegar and long acidification are what actually preserve them.
- Bladder and oilDried bladder was the airtight cover of the day. Use glass jars with vinegar-proof plastic-lined lids, or a disc of parchment under the lid; bare metal lids corrode. The spoonful of olive oil floated on top is a traditional oxygen barrier and can be kept or left out.
- Timing and yieldThree days of brine changes, then the milk stage, then the wrapped overnight cooling, then a day standing in hot pickle, then a month to six weeks in a cool place before opening. Yield depends on the size of the onions and how closely they pack into the jars.
Pickled onions are one of the oldest surviving British store-cupboard preserves, and Mrs Beeton's insistence on snow-white, transparent, crisp onions reflects a period when a jar of pickles was judged as much by appearance as flavour: it sat on the table beside cold meat, bread and cheese. The milk step turns up in several nineteenth-century pickling recipes, though its practical effect is mostly that of a very gentle blanch. The "seasonable from the middle of July to the end of August" note is the real signal of the age of the recipe: pickling onions were a short-season crop that had to be dealt with when the beds were lifted, and the process ran over four days. Sealing with bladder tied over the jar mouth was standard before screw-top lids became cheap and common in the later nineteenth century.