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Pickled Onions
Peel small white onions, cover with brine, allowing one and one-half cups salt to two quarts boiling water, and let stand two days; drain, and cover with more brine; let stand two days, and again drain. Make more brine and heat to boiling-point; put in onions and boil three minutes. Put in jars, interspersing with bits of mace, white peppercorns, cloves, bits of bay leaf, and slices of red pepper. Fill jars to overflow with vinegar scalded with sugar, allowing one cup sugar to one gallon vinegar. Cork while hot.
A straightforward vinegar pickle in the English style, with one significant gap: the original ends at "cork while hot," which is not a shelf-stable seal by current standards. Read the storage note first.
- Sealing and storageThe recipe's cork-and-hot-fill closure does not produce a vacuum seal. Use two-piece canning lids and a tested current boiling-water process if you want shelf storage, or simply refrigerate the jars and eat within a few months.
- The brine is very strongOne and one-half cups salt to two quarts water is a very heavy brine, on the order of 15 to 20 percent by weight rather than the modest strength of a table brine. Four days in it draws a great deal of water out of the onions, which is what keeps them crisp, but they will be aggressively salty. Drain and rinse well before jarring.
- Onions to use"Small white onions" means pearl or silverskin onions, about three-quarters of an inch to an inch across. Cut a shallow cross in the root end and blanch thirty seconds in boiling water to make the skins slip.
- Three minutes means three minutesThe short boil is the hinge of the recipe. Longer and the onions collapse into something soft and cloudy; the whole point of the four-day brine is a pickle that still cracks between the teeth.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, cider or distilled white. Nineteenth-century vinegar varied and old recipes assumed it was strong; do not dilute, and do not substitute a low-acid wine or artisanal vinegar of unstated strength.
- Mace and white peppercornsMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in blades or ground; blades are what is wanted here. White peppercorns are used in place of black to keep the pickle pale. "Slices of red pepper" means a fresh or dried hot chile, not sweet bell pepper.
- Sugar quantityOne cup to a gallon of vinegar is a rounding error, not a sweet pickle. Scald the vinegar with the sugar just long enough to dissolve it and to drive off some of the harshness.
- Yield and timingTwo pounds of peeled pearl onions fills roughly two pint jars. Give them at least three to four weeks before opening so the spices and vinegar penetrate; they are unpleasantly raw before that.
Pickled onions belong to the British table more than the American one, and their presence in a Boston cooking school book of the 1890s reflects how much of that curriculum was still Anglo-American in its condiments: blade mace, cloves and white peppercorns are the spice cabinet of an eighteenth-century English pickle jar. The long salt soak before the vinegar is the older technique, and the reason for it is textural rather than preservative: salt draws water from the onion cells so the vinegar does not simply dilute itself and the onion does not turn flabby. These were practical recipes for a household without refrigeration, where a shelf of vinegar pickles supplied the sharp note that a winter of salt meat and root vegetables otherwise lacked. The reliance on corks is a reminder that the modern two-piece canning lid, and the tested processing times that go with it, were still decades away.