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Green Pickles for Daily Use
1 Gallon of Vinegar 3/4 Pound of Salt 1/4 Pound of Ginger 1 Ounce of Mace 1 Ounce of Mustard Seed 1 Teaspoon Cayenne Pepper Simmer all in the vinegar and when cold put in jar. You may throw in fresh vegetables when you choose.
This is not a pickle so much as a standing pickling liquor — a spiced vinegar kept in a crock, into which vegetables were dropped as they came in from the garden. The whole thing hinges on the vinegar staying strong enough to preserve.
- Use vinegar of known strengthBuy cider or distilled vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, which is what commercial vinegar now guarantees. Homemade or unlabelled vinegar of unknown strength is the one substitution that undermines the whole method.
- Simmer briefly, coveredAcetic acid is volatile and boils off in open steam. Bring the vinegar and spices barely to a simmer, cover, and hold five to ten minutes to draw out the spice, no longer.
- The saltThree-quarters of a pound is roughly 1 1/4 cups of fine salt. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt and its anti-caking agents can cloud the liquor and darken the vegetables.
- Ginger means dried rootA quarter pound of ginger here is whole dried root, bruised with the flat of a knife, not the ground powder and not fresh ginger. Ground ginger in that quantity would turn the vinegar to sludge.
- MaceMace is the lacy red aril around the nutmeg seed, sold as blades or ground. An ounce of blades is a generous handful; tie the whole spices in muslin so they can be lifted out.
- Cool completely before adding anythingThe recipe is explicit that the liquor goes into the jar cold. Warm vinegar poured over raw vegetables will partly cook them, giving a softer pickle.
- The dilution problemEvery batch of fresh vegetables carries water that thins the vinegar, and a crock opened daily is repeatedly recontaminated. Salt vegetables overnight and drain them well before they go in, keep everything submerged, and treat the jar as a refrigerator pickle rather than a pantry one — modern kitchens have no cool stone larder to rely on.
- Vessel and yieldThe 'jar' of the original was most likely stoneware; a wide glass jar with a non-reactive lid does the same job, and nothing metal should touch the liquor.
- What to put in itFirm things only — cucumbers, green beans, cauliflower florets, small onions, sliced peppers, green tomatoes. Soft summer vegetables collapse.
The "daily use" in the title is the point: this is a perpetual pickle pot, a crock of spiced vinegar kept going through the growing season and topped up with whatever the garden gave that week, a habit generally traced to English kitchen practice and often said to have persisted in American household books into the nineteenth century. The spicing — mace, dried ginger, mustard seed, cayenne — draws on the warm aromatics of older English pickling rather than the dill and garlic that dominate American pickles now, though cayenne in particular is more characteristic of later cookery. "Green pickles" is an ambiguous phrase: it may refer simply to the vegetables, though greening was an active period practice, and cookbooks of the era often advised greening pickles by heating them in copper vessels or adding alum, something this recipe does not mention. Its appearance in a bride's cookbook is suggestive of a standing pickle crock kept as running equipment, like a bread sponge or a stock pot, rather than as a one-off project.