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Mock Olives
Take two quarts of green plums; one and onehalf tablespoons of mustard seed; two quarts of vinegar and two and one-half tablespoons of salt. Place the plums in a stone jar. Turn the vinegar into a preserving-kettle, and add the salt; bring it to the boiling point and pour it on the plums. Cover closely. The next day drain off the vinegar, again heat it and pour it on the plums. When cold put them in olive bottles and cork tightly.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle that borrows the firm bite of unripe plums to stand in for imported olives. The recipe is simple, but it leaves out where the mustard seed goes and assumes a cool cellar for storage.
- Use genuinely unripe plumsThe whole effect depends on hard, green, immature fruit picked before the flesh softens — windfalls from a thinning are ideal. Ripe plums collapse in hot vinegar and give you a sour compote rather than something olive-like.
- The mustard seedThe ingredient list includes it but the method never mentions it. Divide it among the plums in the jar before the first pour, so it steeps through both hot vinegar treatments.
- MeasuresTwo quarts is 8 cups by volume for the plums and 64 fl oz for the vinegar. Two and one-half tablespoons of salt in two quarts of vinegar is a light brine by pickling standards; it seasons rather than cures.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5% cider or distilled white vinegar. Household vinegar of the period varied, and anything sold as "reduced acidity" or a specialty wine vinegar below 5% will not hold a pickle stored outside the refrigerator.
- SaltUse pickling or kosher salt. Iodised table salt clouds the vinegar and the anti-caking agents leave a haze on the plums.
- Stone jar and preserving-kettleA stone jar is a glazed crock; any non-reactive vessel — glass, ceramic, stainless — will do. Heat the vinegar in stainless or enamelled steel, never bare aluminium or copper, which reacts with acid.
- Why two poursReheating and returning the same vinegar on the second day is a common way of firming fruit gradually without subjecting it to a boil that would split the skins, though the recipe itself gives no reason for the step. Do not shortcut it to a single pour.
- Bottles and storage"Olive bottles" are narrow-necked glass jars; use screw-top jars instead of corks. These are not heat-processed, so store them in the refrigerator and treat them as a keeping pickle of a few months, not a shelf-stable preserve.
- Yield and timingAbout two quarts of pickles. Give them at least two to three weeks before opening — straight out of the second pour they taste only of raw vinegar.
"Mock" dishes fill a great deal of space in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — mock turtle, mock duck, mock cream — often because the real article was imported, expensive, or simply unavailable inland. Table olives were largely an imported delicacy and priced accordingly. Unripe plums, meanwhile, were free in any orchard where the fruit had to be thinned, and their firm flesh and astringent skin take to a salted vinegar pickle in a way that produces a genuinely olive-ish snap. Butterick, a pattern company whose cook book was aimed squarely at the practical middle-class housekeeper, prints it among the pickles. It is worth noting that the resemblance is textural rather than chemical: real olives are debittered and cured, usually with lye or long brining, while these are simply pickled fruit.