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Cucumber Pickles
Use the smallest cucumbers you can procure, making two and one-half inches the limit of length. To each one hundred cucumbers allow one ounce of mustard seed, one ounce of cloves, one large tablespoon of salt, one cup of sugar and two small red peppers. Put the spices in thin muslin bags, using at least two bags to each one hundred pickles. Place the cucumbers in a kettle on the stove with enough good vinegar to cover them; also place the bags of spices in the vinegar, together with the peppers cut in slices. Heat the vinegar as slowly as possible; and when it is scalding hot the pickles are ready to set away. If this recipe is carefully followed, perfectly satisfactory results will be obtained.
This is a preserving recipe, and by current standards it is incomplete in the places that matter. The notes below explain what is missing rather than how to fill the gaps.
- The vinegar strength is unspecified"Good vinegar" in household use covered everything from sharp commercial cider vinegar to weak homemade barrel vinegar. Safe pickling depends on knowing the acetic acid concentration and on not diluting it below the threshold with the water the cucumbers themselves give up; the recipe gives no way to know where it lands.
- Nothing is processed or sealedThe cucumbers are heated only until the vinegar is "scalding hot" and then "set away." There is no jar sterilisation, no headspace, no boiling-water processing and no seal check, so the contents are held at room temperature in an open-ended container of unknown acidity. Mould and yeast growth on the surface is the usual result, and surface moulds raise the pH of what is beneath them.
- No time, no temperature, no storage direction"Scalding hot" is a visual cue somewhere below boiling, and the recipe never says how long the pickles keep or where they should be kept. A modern tested pickle recipe specifies vinegar percentage, jar size, processing minutes and altitude adjustment. Use one of those instead.
- ScaleOne hundred cucumbers under 2½ inches is far more than most kitchens now put up at one time.
- The spice bagsWhole mustard seed and whole cloves tied into muslin were used so the brine would stay clear and the spices could be lifted out; an ounce of cloves is a very assertive amount and would dominate a smaller batch scaled down proportionally.
- The sugar and salt are seasoning, not preservativeOne cup of sugar and one tablespoon of salt across a hundred cucumbers is far too little to contribute anything to preservation. All the keeping power here is meant to come from the vinegar alone, which is why its unknown strength is the whole problem.
Cucumber pickles of this kind — small whole cucumbers, whole spices in a bag, vinegar brought up hot and poured over — were a fixture of American household preserving from the early nineteenth century onward, and general cookbooks of the era commonly carried versions of them. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book as part of a broader line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its patterns, and its pickle chapter reflects the assumption that a household would put up produce in quantity each summer against a winter with little fresh vegetable matter. The confident closing line, "perfectly satisfactory results will be obtained," is characteristic of the period's cookery writing: instructions were given as fixed procedures rather than as ranges, because few home cooks had a thermometer, and none had a pH strip or a way of knowing the acidity of the vinegar in the jug. Reliable domestic canning guidance in the United States is generally traced to the extension bulletins that followed the First World War, well after books like this one were setting the standard.