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Pickled Cucumbers
100 small cucumbers 1 pint salt Alum size of a nutmeg Boiling water Boiling vinegar 1 tablespoon mustard seed 1 tablespoon whole allspice 1 root horseradish 2 small red peppers Wash and dry the pickles and put them in a large stone jar; add salt and alum and cover well with boiling water. Cover the jar tightly and let stand for twenty-four hours; remove the cucumbers; dry them and place them in another jar in layers alternately with the spices and grated horseradish. Have the jar about two thirds full of cucumbers and pour over them sufficient boiling vinegar to fill the jar. When cold, cover closely and stand away.
This is a crock pickle from the era before home canning was put on a measured footing, and the gaps in it are exactly the ones that matter. The points below explain what the instructions leave out rather than filling them in.
- No measured acidityThe recipe never states the strength of the vinegar, and vinegar sold at the time ranged widely, some of it well under the 5 percent acetic acid modern tested recipes require. Wet cucumbers packed two thirds full also dilute whatever is poured over them by an unknown amount, so the finished pH is unknowable.
- No heat processing, no sealThe jar is simply covered when cold and "stood away." There is no boiling-water bath, no jar or lid sterilisation and no vacuum seal, which leaves a vessel of unverified acidity in unspecified storage conditions for an unspecified length of time.
- Alum "size of a nutmeg"This is potassium alum, used to firm pickle tissue. Beyond being an unmeasurable quantity, it has been dropped from current home-preserving guidance because it contributes nothing to safety and is unnecessary for crispness.
- The salt brine is undefinedA pint of salt is given, but the water is only "boiling water... to cover." Curing brines work on ratio; without a stated volume of water the salt concentration, and therefore whether anything is actually being cured, cannot be known.
- Stone jarVintage glazed stoneware is a questionable vessel for a long acid soak: some old glazes carry lead, and acid is precisely what mobilises it.
- Archaic measures, for reading onlyA pint of salt is a volume, roughly 1 lb of table salt or considerably less of flake salt; "size of a nutmeg" is perhaps a teaspoon or two of lump alum. "One hundred small cucumbers" suggests a several-gallon crock, a scale that assumes a cellar and a large household.
- If you want these picklesUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority, which will specify vinegar strength, brine ratio, jar preparation and processing time. This page is worth reading, not following.
Cucumbers salted for a day, drained, then flooded with hot spiced vinegar is one of the oldest and most widespread of English-language pickling methods, and it survives here almost unchanged. The alum is the period's signature: cooks believed it kept the cucumber flesh from going flabby, and it appears in pickle recipes on both sides of the Atlantic through the nineteenth century before being quietly abandoned. Horseradish root, whole allspice, mustard seed and small red peppers make up a standard pickling mixture of the day, assembled loose. The scale, a hundred cucumbers in a stone jar, belongs to a household that put up its own produce by the bushel.