Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Salad (Dozen cucumbers small onions)
2 dozen cucumbers 6 small onions 6 tablespoons salt 1 gill olive oil 1 tablespoon celery seed 1 quart vinegar Cucumber salad should be made in large quantities, as it will keep indefinitely and is good to serve in emergencies. Peel and slice thin the cucumbers and onions; spread in layers; sprinkle with salt and let stand for several hours. Then drain. Mix the oil and celery seed; add the vinegar, drop by drop, and pour over the cucumbers and onions. Mix well; put into sterilized pint jars; seal and set away in a cool, dark place.
This is a raw, oil-dressed cucumber pickle sealed into jars and stored for months without any heat processing or measured acidity. It cannot be recommended today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- No processing step at allThe jars are filled with raw vegetables and cold dressing, sealed, and set away. Nothing in the method brings the contents to a temperature that destroys spores or vegetative bacteria, and "sterilized jars" only addresses the glass, not the food going into it.
- Acidity is unmeasured and dilutedA quart of vinegar of unknown strength is spread over two dozen cucumbers and six onions, all of them still carrying water the salting did not remove. There is no way to know whether the finished jar sits below the pH 4.6 line that keeps Clostridium botulinum from growing, and low-acid vegetables in a sealed, oxygen-poor jar are precisely the conditions the organism favours.
- The oil makes it worseA gill of olive oil (half a cup) floats over the vegetables and forms a barrier. Oil layered over unacidified vegetables is a recognised botulism hazard, which is why commercial vegetable-in-oil products are acidified and refrigerated under controlled conditions.
- Onion and garlic-family vegetablesChopped garlic bottled in oil has caused documented botulism outbreaks, and cooked onions held under fat have caused another. Six onions sliced thin and sealed under oil in a cool, dark cupboard falls into the same hazard class.
- "Keep indefinitely" is the tellThe promise of indefinite shelf life at cellar temperature, with no boiling-water bath and no pressure canner, belongs to a period before the risks of botulism in home canning were widely understood in domestic kitchens. Toxin gives no reliable warning by smell, taste or appearance.
- If you want the dishUse a current USDA or National Center for Home Food Preservation recipe for cucumber pickles, or make the same combination as a fresh salad to be eaten within a few days from the refrigerator.
Cucumbers came into most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchens in a glut and left in jars. A household with a garden row faced a fortnight of fruit ripening faster than anyone could eat it, and the standard answers were salting, vinegar and a cool cellar. The instruction here to make the salad "in large quantities" so that it is "good to serve in emergencies" describes the real function of a preserved-food shelf before domestic refrigeration: not luxury, but the ability to put something green on the table when an unexpected guest arrived in February. Preserving sections of this kind generally predate the safe-canning guidance that state agricultural extension services promoted from the First World War onward. Salting cucumbers to draw out water before dressing them is sound technique and still standard; the sealed jar and the cellar are what the intervening century has ruled out.