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Sweet Pickle-Pear
7 lbs. peeled pears. 3 lbs. sugar. 1 pint apple vinegar. 1/2 oz. cloves. 1/2 oz. stick cinnamon. 1 oz. allspice.
Cook pears until done, then pack in jars and cook sirup thick and cover the pears well. Seal tight.
Hotch Potch Pickle. 1 large head firm cabbage. 2 dozen cucumbers. 2 dozen green tomatoes. 1/2 dozen white onions. 4 green peppers.
Chop all ingredients fine, cover with one-half pint salt, stand all night, put in a bag to drain. Cover with weak vinegar, let stand twenty-four hours. Next morning drain off vinegar and to every gallon pickle put one-half pound sugar, one dozen cloves, one ounce white mustard seed, one ounce celery seed. Put all in preserving kettle with strong vinegar and let boil one-half hour.
Two preserving recipes run together here, and both rely on the old open-kettle method: hot food into jars, lid on, no processing. That is the reason neither can be followed as printed.
- Open-kettle sealing"Pack in jars... seal tight" with no boiling-water processing was common practice in the period and is no longer considered sound. Nothing in the method sterilizes the jar rim, the lid, or the headspace air, and a jar that seals by cooling alone can seal over spoilage. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want to put either of these up.
- Pear acidity is not controlledSeven pounds of pears against one pint of vinegar and three pounds of sugar gives no reliable finished acidity. Ripe pears can sit close to pH 4.6, the line below which a high-acid, water-bath-safe product must fall, and some varieties exceed it. Modern pickled-pear recipes fix the vinegar-to-fruit ratio and specify vinegar strength for exactly this reason.
- The Hotch Potch drains its acid awayThe vegetables are held in "weak vinegar" for twenty-four hours, that vinegar is poured off, and "strong vinegar" is added by eye. Cabbage, onions and green tomatoes are all low-acid, and there is no measured quantity or concentration at any stage, so the finished pickle's pH is unknown.
- "Weak" and "strong" vinegarHousehold vinegar of the period varied in strength, and the recipe gives no measure or concentration for either. Current preserving practice specifies 5 percent acetic acid and measures it, which is not something the original text lets you reconstruct.
- Apple vinegarCider vinegar, of uncertain strength at the time. Commercial cider vinegar today is standardized, but that does not repair the missing ratios above.
- Whole spices by weightThe spices are specified by weight rather than volume. These are flavor quantities only and have no preservative effect worth counting on.
- ScaleSeven pounds of pears is a large batch by modern standards. The Hotch Potch is larger still, which is why the seasonings are given per gallon of drained pickle rather than as a single total.
Mrs. Wilson's cookery writing comes out of the food-conservation years around the First World War, when Mary A. Wilson wrote widely on saving, stretching and putting up the household's food, and its preserving pages are unusually crowded as a result. "Hotch potch" is hodgepodge carried into the pickle crock: a chopped mixed pickle of whatever the late garden gave up at once, close kin to the chow-chows and piccalillis of the same period, and built on the same two-stage technique of salting the vegetables overnight to draw out water before any vinegar goes near them. The reliance on "seal tight" alone is characteristic of the era: home canning guidance in the United States was only beginning to be standardized, and the shift to measured processing times came later.