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Pickling (Again let stand three days)
again let stand three days; repeat. Drain, wipe cucumbers. and pour over one gallon boiling water in which one tablespoon alum has been dissolved. Let stand six hours, then drain from alum water. Cook cucumbers ten minutes, a few at a time, in one-fourth the following mixture heated to the boiling-point and boiled ten minutes: - 1 gallon vinegar 2 sticks cinnamon 4 red peppers 2 tablespoons allspice berries 2 tablespoons cloves Strain remaining liquor over pickles which have been put in a stone jar.
This page is the tail end of a longer pickle recipe — the first instruction on it is "again let stand three days," which means the salting and brining stage that governs the whole process is on the previous page and is not here. What survives cannot be followed safely as a standalone procedure.
- The recipe is a fragmentEverything that determined the salt concentration, the soaking schedule and the quantity of cucumbers is missing. Without the brine step there is no way to know whether the vegetables are being preserved or merely flavoured, and the vinegar-to-vegetable ratio is unknowable.
- Unsealed storage in a stone jarThe pickles are simply covered with strained hot spiced vinegar in an open crock. Nothing is sealed, nothing is heat-processed, and there is no stated storage temperature or keeping time. Modern practice requires either a tested boiling-water-bath process in sealed jars or continuous refrigeration.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acetic acid content, and the recipe never specifies it. A safe pickle depends on the finished brine reaching a reliable acidity, which this text gives no way to verify.
- AlumA gallon of water carrying a tablespoon of alum was a common crisping soak of the period. Potassium alum is still sold, but it is no longer recommended for pickling: it contributes nothing to preservation, can leave an astringent taste, and the amounts here are not measured against a known weight of cucumbers.
- Ten minutes in boiling vinegarCooking cucumbers a full ten minutes in boiling spiced vinegar is likely to soften them considerably. Even setting the safety questions aside, the firmness the recipe is chasing with the alum soak may be undone by the boil.
- Whole spices and hot peppersTwo sticks of cinnamon, four red peppers and two tablespoons each of allspice berries and cloves to a gallon of vinegar is a heavy, old-fashioned spicing. Loose spices also cloud and darken the liquor, which is why later recipes bag them.
- If you want to make picklesUse a current tested recipe with stated salt weights, vinegar acidity and processing times.
Cucumber pickling of this kind belongs to the crock-and-cellar tradition of the nineteenth-century household kitchen. The long repeated stand — three days, drain, repeat — precedes the vinegar, though the fragment does not say what that stage involves, and the alum bath was the near-universal household trick for keeping the skins firm; alum appears in pickle recipes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was quietly dropped from home-canning guidance in the twentieth. The spice list, heavy on cinnamon, cloves and allspice, belongs to the aromatic repertoire of the Anglo-American kitchen, inherited from an earlier era when imported spices signalled a well-provisioned larder.