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Cucumber Sweet Pickle
Pare large seed cucumbers and cut in strips. Remove the seeds, wash thoroughly, then soak for four days in salt and water, changing every day. Soak the cucumbers in alum water one day and drain over night. For seven pounds of cucumbers, take three pounds of sugar, one ounce cinnamon, two ounces cloves, one grated nutmeg, one tablespoon ginger, one quart vinegar. Put the spices in a bag. Boil together for fifteen minutes or more. It is best to watch carefully and remove each piece when clear.
A long-brine sweet pickle of the kind made from cucumbers that grew too big for slicing. Almost all the work is waiting; the only real skill is knowing when to lift each piece out of the syrup.
- Watch for the clear momentThe instruction to "remove each piece when clear" is the whole recipe. As the syrup penetrates, the flesh turns from opaque white-green to translucent amber; pieces left past that point collapse. Strips will not finish at the same time, so fish them out individually with a fork or slotted spoon and return the syrup to the boil.
- "Seed cucumbers"These are overgrown, mature cucumbers with tough yellowing skin and developed seeds — the ones a modern gardener finds hiding under the leaves. Ordinary supermarket slicing cucumbers work but give thinner strips; English or Persian types, with their thin walls and soft, watery flesh, hold up less well.
- The alum waterNo quantity is given. Period recipes vary — quantities on the order of a tablespoon of powdered alum to a quart or a gallon of water turn up — and it was used as a firming agent. Alum is still sold for pickling but is easy to overdo, and it leaves a faint astringency; the soak can simply be omitted, or a commercial calcium chloride crisping salt used per its own directions.
- The salt soak, safelyThe recipe gives no salt strength and no temperature. Do the four days of brining with a daily change of water in the refrigerator, and keep the strips fully submerged under the brine.
- SpicesTwo ounces of cloves for seven pounds of fruit is heavy by modern taste; an ounce is plenty, and use whole cloves and cinnamon sticks in the bag rather than ground. "One grated nutmeg" means a whole nutmeg, about two teaspoons grated. Ground spices seep through the bag and will cloud and darken the syrup.
- VinegarA quart of vinegar at modern 5 percent acidity is the right substitute. Cider vinegar suits the spices; do not dilute it, since the three pounds of sugar already soften the sharpness considerably.
- Boiling timeFifteen minutes is a minimum, not a target. Thick strips of mature cucumber often need thirty to forty minutes in the syrup before they clear, and the syrup thickens as it reduces — add a little water if it starts to caramelize.
- Yield and keepingSeven pounds of cucumbers makes roughly six to seven pints. As written this is a fresh-pack pickle with no sealing or processing step: pack the strips in clean jars, cover with the boiling syrup, cool and refrigerate, where they keep for months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure rather than this text.
Sweet spiced cucumber pickle belongs to a large nineteenth-century family of "sweet pickles" — fruit and vegetables held in sugar, vinegar and warm spices, served in small quantities alongside cold meat rather than eaten as a vegetable. The long salt soak and the alum bath are both period practices for the same problem: how to keep an overgrown, watery cucumber from turning to mush during a long boil in syrup. Alum appears constantly in American pickle chapters of this era and slowly disappeared over the twentieth century as cooks came to distrust its taste and its dosage. The Butterick Cook Book (1911), issued by the dress-pattern company that also published the Delineator, was aimed at the same middle-class household that grew its own cucumbers, and a chapter on pickles and catsups was an expected part of any such book — this was thrift work as much as cookery, turning the end of the cucumber row into something that would last the winter.