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Cucumber Pickle Brine
To fill quart jars with cucumber pickles, make the following brine:-1 pint vinegar; 2 tbsp. each, salt, mustard and brown sugar. Mix and when cucumbers are big enough for pickles, drop them in from time to time until jar is full. Wash and dry pickles before putting into brine. Pickles ready to eat in a month.
— Mrs. Roscoe Blunt
A gherkin brine of the old accumulating kind: the jar is started with the brine and filled with cucumbers as the vines produce them. The mixture is workable, but a few things in it are unstated and one of them matters.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5% acidity cider or white vinegar, undiluted as written. Vinegars sold as "reduced acid" or fancy artisan bottles of unknown strength are not safe for keeping pickles and should not be substituted here.
- "Mustard" is ambiguousTwo tablespoons of mustard could mean dry powder or whole yellow seed; both were common in period pickle jars. Whole seed gives a milder, clearer brine, powder a sharper, cloudier one.
- SaltTwo tablespoons should be pickling, kosher or plain sea salt. Iodized table salt darkens the cucumbers and the anti-caking agents turn the brine milky.
- Keep it coldThis is a raw, unprocessed jar with no boiling-water bath and no seal. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle from the moment the first cucumber goes in, and keep it refrigerated for the whole month. The recipe gives no storage direction of its own.
- The dilution problemEach cucumber added releases water and weakens the brine. Keep the jar tight-packed so the cucumbers stay fully submerged, and top up with fresh vinegar rather than water if the level drops.
- Choose the right cucumberSmall, firm pickling varieties two to four inches long; slicing cucumbers go hollow and slack. Trim a sliver off the blossom end, which carries an enzyme that softens pickles from the inside.
- YieldOne pint of brine dresses roughly one quart jar of whole small cucumbers, as the recipe's opening line specifies. Scale the brine per jar rather than making a large batch, since each jar fills at its own pace.
- Judging itA month is about right for small cucumbers to take the vinegar through. Anything soft, slippery, or with mold at the surface goes out; sound pickles stay crisp and squeak against the teeth.
Adding cucumbers to a standing jar "from time to time" was the ordinary answer to an ordinary garden problem: cucumbers ripen a few at a time over weeks, never enough at once to justify a full canning day. The technique is old, and it survives today as the refrigerator pickle. The book itself belongs to the Baraca-Philathea movement, the adult Bible-class organization that spread through North American Protestant churches in the early twentieth century, with Philathea classes for young women; their compiled cookbooks were sold to raise money and are made up almost entirely of signed contributions like this one, which is why Mrs. Roscoe Blunt's name sits under the brine.