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Salt (Gallon vinegar Prepare)
1 gallon vinegar Prepare vegetables and cut in small pieces, cover with salt, let stand twenty-four hours, and drain. Heat vinegar and spices to boiling-point, add vegetables, and cook until soft.
This is a fragment: the page carries the tail of an ingredient list (one gallon of vinegar) and a three-line method, with the vegetables, the salt and the spices all unquantified. As printed it cannot be followed safely for keeping.
- No acidity is specifiedSafe vinegar pickling depends on the finished product holding at or below pH 4.6, which in practice means a vinegar of known strength (5 percent acetic acid is the modern standard) in a measured ratio to the vegetables. Nineteenth-century cider and "pickling" vinegars varied widely in strength, and this text gives neither the vinegar's acidity nor the weight of vegetables it is meant to cover.
- No salt quantity"Cover with salt, let stand twenty-four hours" was a dry-salting step meant to draw water out of the vegetables so they would not dilute the vinegar. Without a weight of salt or a brine concentration, the amount of water removed, and therefore the acidity of the finished pickle, is unknowable.
- No packing, sealing or processing stepThe recipe stops at "cook until soft." There is no instruction to fill hot, leave headspace, seal, or process in a boiling-water bath. Vegetables are low-acid, and improperly acidified, improperly sealed vegetables in a jar are the classic vehicle for Clostridium botulinum. Use a current tested pickle recipe from a food-preservation authority instead.
- Mixed pickle, not one vegetableFor context only: the surviving line "prepare vegetables and cut in small pieces" suggests a mixed pickle. Period versions commonly used cauliflower, small cucumbers, green tomatoes, onions and peppers cut to a uniform size so they would soften at the same rate, though this text names none of them.
- "Spices" meant a bag"Spices" probably meant a bag -- Period pickling recipes often called for whole spices such as mustard seed, peppercorns, allspice, cloves and a piece of stick cinnamon, tied in cheesecloth and boiled in the vinegar so the finished pickle would not be muddied by grounds. This text does not say which spices, or in what form.
- "Cook until soft" is period tasteBoiling vegetables in vinegar to softness produced a much softer pickle than modern practice aims for; modern pickling generally keeps cauliflower and cucumber crisper by limiting hot vinegar contact to a few minutes.
Mixed pickle of this kind was a fixture of the American preserving cupboard from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and appears to have served as a domestic alternative to the imported bottled pickles and chow-chows sold by grocers. The two-stage method here, dry salt first and vinegar second, is an older European technique: salt draws out the vegetables' water so the vinegar that follows is not weakened, and the vegetables keep some firmness. The page as it survives here appears to have lost its ingredient list in transcription, which is a useful reminder that these recipes were written for cooks who already knew roughly what went into a mixed pickle and needed only the proportions and the timing.