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Pickled Onions and Cucumbers
10 Green Cucumbers, large 1/2 Dozen Small Onions Red Pepper, Vinegar, Sugar Peel cucumbers, cut them and the onions into thick slices, crosswise; sprinkle with salt; let stand for a day and drain. Put them in a jar, pour over sufficient boiling vinegar to cover and keep in warm place from twelve to eighteen hours. Drain off vinegar, heat again and pour over till both onions and cucumbers are quite green, adding a little red pepper and speck of sugar the last time of boiling. Cover tightly and put in cool place.
A fresh-pack vinegar pickle in the older style, with the quantities of vinegar, sugar and pepper left entirely to the cook. The repeated hot-vinegar pours do the work; nothing is boiled in the jar.
- Ignore the greeningPeeled cucumbers are unlikely to turn 'quite green' from repeated hot-vinegar pours alone. The instruction probably descends from the old practice of greening pickles in copper or brass kettles, where the colour came from a reaction with the metal. Judge doneness by texture and flavour instead: the slices should be translucent and evenly sour.
- Vinegar strengthUse plain distilled white or cider vinegar at 5 per cent acidity, which is standard on supermarket shelves. Anything labelled for salad dressing or an artisanal vinegar of unstated strength is unreliable here, since acidity is the only thing preserving the jar.
- How much of everythingFor 10 large cucumbers and 6 small onions you will need enough vinegar to cover the jar, judged by eye rather than by a fixed measure, salt enough to coat the slices for the overnight draw, and a spoonful or two of sugar at the last boiling. 'Speck of sugar' means seasoning, not sweetening — this is not a bread-and-butter pickle.
- Green cucumbersThis means unripe, firm, fresh-picked field cucumbers, not a green-skinned variety. Kirby or pickling cucumbers are the right thing; long English cucumbers are too watery and their flesh collapses.
- The salting stageA full day under salt is on the long side for peeled slices. Twelve hours is plenty, and drain thoroughly — do not rinse away all the salt, since drawing out water is what keeps the slices from going limp.
- Warm place, twelve to eighteen hoursIn a range-heated kitchen this meant the back of the stove or a shelf above it. A modern equivalent is simply the counter overnight; do not use a warm oven or a proofing setting.
- StorageThis is not a sealed, processed preserve — nothing is water-bath canned and the jar is not vacuum sealed. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle: keep it cold and eat it within a month or two. The original's 'cool place' meant an unheated cellar or larder, colder than a modern kitchen cupboard.
- YieldA large batch, several quarts depending on how thick you cut. Sliced a quarter-inch thick they are a sandwich and cold-meat pickle rather than something to serve on their own.
Pickle chapters were a standard feature of household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a housekeeper was expected to lay in a supply of sharp condiments to carry the household through a winter of salt meat, roasts and cold suppers. Cucumber-and-onion pickles like this one are close kin to the American bread-and-butter pickle, sharing the salt-draw, the sliced onion and the repeated hot vinegar pour, though this version keeps sugar to a 'speck' rather than the heavy syrup of later commercial versions. The expectation that pickles turn 'quite green' is usually traced to the copper and brass preserving kettles of earlier kitchens, whose reaction with vinegar brightened the colour; warnings against deliberately greening pickles in copper were long established by the time this book was printed, and the instruction seems to have survived as an expectation after the means of producing it had been abandoned.