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Sweet Cucumber Pickles
12 Green Cucumbers 1 Coffee Cup Granulated Sugar 1 Cup Vinegar 2 Teaspoons each Cloves and Cinnamon Soak cucumbers in weak salt water about an hour. Make a thick syrup of sugar and vinegar. Tie up cloves and cinnamon in a muslin cloth and boil in Syrup until it thickens. Drain cucumbers, rinse well in clear water and add to the syrup; set them back on the range and let them simmer gently for three hours.
A cooked sweet pickle of the kind meant to be eaten within a few weeks, not a canned shelf preserve. The instructions assume a coal range with a cool back plate, which changes how the three-hour simmer should be read.
- The hinge: a bare simmer"Set them back on the range" means the cooler back of a wood or coal stove, where liquid barely moves. On a modern burner, use the lowest setting; a brisk simmer for three hours risks softening the cucumbers badly.
- Coffee cupPeriod coffee cups ran smaller than today's mugs, roughly 3/4 to 1 cup. Treat it as 1 cup granulated sugar against the 1 cup vinegar; the ratio is what matters.
- The cucumbers"Green cucumbers" most likely means small pickling cucumbers rather than the long slicing kind, though the recipe gives no size; on that reading twelve would come to roughly 2 lb. Waxed supermarket slicers are a poor substitute.
- Weak salt waterAbout 2 tablespoons of salt per quart of water is the usual reading. The hour-long soak draws water out and firms the flesh; the rinse afterwards is not optional or the finished pickle will be harshly salty.
- Whole spices, not groundTying spice in muslin only makes sense with whole cloves and broken cinnamon stick. Two teaspoons of whole cloves is assertive; ground spice in a bag will leach through and cloud the syrup.
- "Boil until it thickens"Reduce only until the syrup coats a spoon lightly; taken too far it will darken and turn stiff once the cucumbers release their own water.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5% cider or white vinegar. Household vinegar of the period was not standardised and its strength varied.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart. There is no sterilising, sealing or processing step here, so pack into a clean jar, cover with the syrup, refrigerate and eat within a month. Do not treat this as a shelf-stable canning recipe.
Sweet spiced pickles like this one belong to the American "sweet pickle" tradition that ran through nineteenth-century household cookery: cucumbers, peaches, watermelon rind or crabapples cooked slowly in a sugar-and-vinegar syrup with clove and cinnamon, the same spice pairing that flavoured mincemeat and spiced fruit. They sat on the table as a sharp-sweet relish against cold meat, ham or a heavy roast. The muslin spice bag is a practical touch that allows the whole spices to be lifted out once they have given up their flavour, and the direction to "set them back on the range" points to a solid-fuel stove: it was always hot somewhere, and a pot could be parked at the cool end for hours at no extra cost in fuel or attention.