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Ripe Cucumber Pickles-Sour
12 Large, Ripe Yellow Cucumbers 1/2 Dozen Red Peppers 1 Fresh Horseradish 1 Pound Mustard Seed Cut cucumbers in halves, removing seeds and pulp, cut in oblongs and stand over night in salt water; next morning rinse in clear water, drain and wipe as dry as possible, placing them in a jar.
Remove seeds from peppers and cut in small narrow pieces; cut horseradish in small pieces. Sprinkle peppers, horseradish and mustard seed between the slices of cucumber; have enough boiling vinegar to cover all and pour over. On the third morning scald vinegar again, adding extra vinegar if too weak; they are ready for use when cold. May be put away in glass jars on third morning.
This is an open-crock vinegar pickle of a kind that has been superseded: nothing in it is measured for acidity, and the finished jars are never heat-processed. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- No measured acidityThe recipe calls for "enough boiling vinegar to cover" and then tells you to add more "if too weak" without saying how weakness is to be judged. Overripe cucumbers are mostly water and dilute the brine substantially as they sit, and there is no way to know from this text whether the finished pickle lands below pH 4.6, the line under which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Tested modern pickle recipes fix the vinegar strength (5 percent acetic acid) and the vinegar-to-water ratio for exactly this reason.
- Salt brine of unknown strength"Stand over night in salt water" gives no proportion. The overnight salting is doing real work here — drawing water out of the flesh so the vinegar is not immediately diluted — and without a stated salt concentration the step is unreproducible.
- Jarred without processing"May be put away in glass jars on third morning" means jars filled with pickles and vinegar and closed, with no boiling-water bath and no seal check. Even a strong vinegar pickle put up this way is a refrigerator pickle at best, not a shelf-stable one, and the recipe appears to intend it for the pantry.
- Ripe cucumbers are the low-acid problemRipe cucumbers are a poor candidate -- "Large, ripe yellow cucumbers" are field cucumbers left on the vine until the skin yellows — softer and seedier than the small green pickling cucumbers modern recipes specify, and, like all cucumbers, low in acid. They are a poor candidate for an unmeasured brine.
- If you want the flavourThe combination of ripe cucumber, red pepper, horseradish and mustard seed is worth having. Use a current tested recipe for mustard or horseradish pickles from a food-safety extension service and follow its quantities exactly.
- A note on the quantitiesFor anyone reading the list rather than cooking from it: a pound of mustard seed is roughly two and a half cups, an enormous amount even for twelve large cucumbers, and "1 Fresh Horseradish" means one whole root, not a piece. Both were traditionally credited with preservative effect as well as flavour.
Ripe cucumber pickle was a thrift dish. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchen gardens produced cucumbers faster than anyone could eat them, and the ones that escaped notice swelled and yellowed on the vine; too seedy and bland for the table, they were seeded, cut into batons and rescued as sour or sweet pickle. Horseradish appears in a great many of these formulas, and it was long held — traditionally rather than on any measured evidence — to keep crock pickles from going soft or growing mould, while the mustard seed supplied both bite and body to the vinegar. The repeated scalding of the vinegar over three mornings, rather than a single sealed process, belongs to the older crock-and-vinegar method rather than to sealed household canning: preservation was judged by taste and appearance.