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Pickled Onions
Small Onions of Equal Size Vinegar, Whole Cloves and Mace Peel and scald onions in salt water until tender, drain and put in glass jars; heat to boiling point enough vinegar to cover them, scalding with it the cloves and mace; pour it over the onions, distributing spices among the jars; seal the jars tight.
A bare-bones vinegar pickle of the sort every early-twentieth-century pickle chapter carried. Nearly all the quantities are left to the cook, so the working figures below fill in the gaps.
- The hinge: a short scald, not a boilThe hinge: a short scald rather than a long boil. The recipe's "until tender" is easily overshot — a few minutes in boiling salted water is usually enough for small onions, and over-scalding gives a soft rather than crisp pickle.
- What "small onions" meansPickling onions or pearl onions, roughly 1 inch across, are the intended thing. Equal size matters because the scald and the vinegar penetrate unevenly otherwise.
- PeelingDrop the unpeeled onions in boiling water for 30 seconds and into cold water; the skins slip off and the root end stays intact so the layers do not fall apart.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, white distilled or cider, and do not dilute it. Period vinegars varied widely, and the recipe gives no way to judge; the acid is the only thing preserving the onions.
- SaltPickling or kosher salt for the scald. Iodized table salt clouds the brine and can darken the onions.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of nutmeg, sold as blade mace or ground. Whole blades are what is wanted here; about one blade and six whole cloves per pint jar, which is enough to scent the vinegar without turning it brown.
- Sealing and storagePouring boiling vinegar into jars and sealing them tight — open-kettle canning — is no longer considered adequate for shelf storage, since the jar contents never reach a controlled temperature and the seal is unreliable. Either follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure for pickled onions or treat these as refrigerator pickles.
- Yield and restingA pint jar takes a modest quantity of onions with vinegar poured over to cover; how much depends on how tightly the onions pack. The flavor is harsh at first and settles after some weeks in a cool place, when the cloves and mace come forward.
Pickled onions came to American kitchens from British practice, where small onions in spiced vinegar were a long-established preserve — certainly by the eighteenth century. The spicing here — whole cloves and blade mace, no chile, no mustard seed — is of a piece with nineteenth-century usage, when mace was an ordinary household spice rather than the specialty item it has become. Pickle chapters were a fixture of household cookbooks and community collections of the period, which assumed a household would put up its own relishes, and a jar of onions was expected on the table beside cold meat or in a relish dish, one of the small sharp things that broke up a succession of boiled and roasted dishes. The recipe's vagueness about quantities is also typical of the genre, which tended to supply the order of operations and little else.