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Ripe Cucumber Pickle
Cut cucumbers in halves lengthwise. Cover with alum water, allowing two teaspoons powdered alum to each quart of water. Heat gradually to boiling-point, then let stand on back of range two hours. Remove from alum water and chill in ice-water. Make a syrup by boiling five minutes two pounds sugar, one pint vinegar, with two tablespoons each of whole cloves and stick cinnamon tied in a piece of muslin. Add cucumbers and cook ten minutes. Remove cucumbers to a stone jar, and pour over the syrup. Scald syrup three successive mornings, and return to cucumbers.
Unripe Cucumber Pickles (Gherkins) Wipe four quarts small unripe cucumbers. Put in a stone jar and add one cup salt dissolved in two quarts boiling water and let stand three days. Drain cucumbers from brine, bring brine to boiling-point, pour over cucumbers, and
This is an open-kettle sweet pickle of a kind that home preserving guidance abandoned decades ago. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method itself is the problem.
- No quantity of cucumbersThe ripe cucumber recipe gives sugar, vinegar and spice amounts but never says how many cucumbers the syrup is meant to cover. Without that ratio there is no way to know the finished acidity of the pack, which is the single thing that keeps a pickle safe.
- Vinegar strength is unstatedVinegar of the period varied in strength and could fall below the 5 percent acetic acid modern recipes assume. Modern safe pickle recipes specify 5 percent vinegar and a fixed vinegar-to-produce ratio for exactly this reason.
- Ripe cucumbers are low-acid and wateryRipe cucumbers are low-acid -- Cucumbers are a low-acid vegetable, and fully ripe, seedy ones give up water into the syrup as they sit. A pack built on an unmeasured amount of ripe fruit can drift out of the acid range that inhibits Clostridium botulinum.
- The stone jar is not a sealA glazed crock with the syrup poured over and no processing is open storage. The three morning scaldings are a period substitute for sterilisation and do not sterilise anything; they reheat the syrup while the cucumbers sit at room temperature between times.
- AlumPotassium aluminium sulphate, sold at druggists as a crisping agent. It is no longer recommended for pickling: it contributes little firmness to properly handled cucumbers and can add a mineral astringency.
- "Back of the range"On a wood or coal range the far end of the top was the coolest zone, used for long, sub-boiling holds. Nothing in a modern kitchen replicates the slow, indefinite temperature drift the recipe assumes.
- The gherkin recipe is a fragmentThe unripe cucumber method breaks off mid-sentence after the first brine scald. Even setting the safety question aside, the instructions here are incomplete.
- If you want the dishSweet ripe cucumber pickle is still made. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service, with weighed produce, 5 percent vinegar and a specified boiling-water process.
Sweet spiced cucumber pickle in a heavy clove-and-cinnamon syrup belongs to the American sweet-pickle tradition, and it is close kin to the sweet watermelon-rind and peach pickles that filled the same shelf. Ripe cucumbers, too seedy and soft for a brine pickle, were halved and put to this use rather than wasted. Alum was a common household pickling ingredient in this period, sold by the druggist and believed to firm the flesh. The three successive morning scaldings belong to open-kettle preserving, a technique that predates reliable home canning jars and depended on a cool store and frequent inspection rather than a hermetic seal.