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Pickled Onions
Use the smallest onions you can find, pour hot water on them, and when their skins can easily be removed, make enough strong brine to cover the onions; let them remain in it from one morning until the next; replace the old brine with the new, allowing it also to remain on the onions twenty-four hours, and change the brine again on the third morning; on the fourth morning put the onions in fresh water and heat them to the scalding point, stirring frequently. A pint of milk added to the water will help whiten the onions during this boiling. Drain well, and place the onions in a jar, pouring scalding hot vinegar over them. If spiced pickles are desired, place one-half pound of "prepared spices," such as may be procured at the grocer's, in thin bags, and steep them in the vinegar fifteen minutes. But if the whiteness that is so appetizing in pickled onions is to be retained, the spices must be omitted. As the onions are placed in the jar, distribute sliced red peppers through them. These pickles present a very attractive appearance when put up in glass jars and sealed the same as canned fruit.
This is a shelf-stable canned pickle built entirely on unmeasured brine and vinegar of unknown strength, and it cannot be reproduced safely from the text as printed. The notes below explain where it fails and what the older terms mean.
- No acidity is specifiedSafe vinegar pickling depends on the finished product holding a pH at or below 4.6, which in practice means vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid used in a measured ratio to the vegetable. The recipe names neither the strength nor the quantity of vinegar, and household vinegar in 1911 varied widely, including cider vinegar of well under 5 percent.
- Onions are a low-acid vegetableRaw onions sit around pH 5.3 to 5.8. Sealing them in a jar with an unmeasured amount of vinegar creates exactly the low-acid, oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate. The sliced red peppers distributed through the jar are also low-acid and add to the load.
- "Sealed the same as canned fruit" is not a process"Sealed the same as canned fruit" is not specified here -- the phrase refers the reader to the book's canning instructions, which are not given on this page, so the actual heat treatment is unknown. As written, pouring scalding vinegar over the onions and closing the lid would be a hot-fill seal rather than a timed thermal process: it produces a convincing vacuum while the contents may never have reached a temperature that matters. Modern practice calls for a measured boiling-water process timed to jar size.
- "Strong brine" is undefinedSome period books gauged brine by whether it would float an egg, which is in the region of 10 percent salt, but the text does not say so, and the salt here is only a preliminary draw anyway. It is discarded before packing and contributes nothing to the keeping quality of the finished jar.
- "Prepared spices"The grocer's ready-mixed pickling spice, blends of which commonly included mustard seed, allspice, cloves, ginger and dried chilli. Half a pound is a large quantity relative to a domestic jar, and the recipe never states how much vinegar it is meant to season.
- The milk trickA pint of milk in the scalding water was a common whitening measure, said to keep the onions pale rather than translucent grey. It is cosmetic only and does nothing for preservation; it also adds a dairy protein to a jar meant to keep for months.
- If you want pickled onionsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give you a stated vinegar strength, a measured vinegar-to-water ratio and a processing time for your jar size.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911 from the pattern company's publishing arm, aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns and The Delineator, and its pickle chapter reflects an era when a household still expected to put up its own relishes rather than buy them. Small white pickling onions had long been a fixture of British and American pickle jars, valued as much for their appearance as their flavour, and the recipe's concern with whiteness is explicit in two places: the milk in the scalding water, and the instruction to omit spices if you want the onions pale. The three-day brining is often said to be a drawing technique meant to pull water out of the onion so it stays crisp and does not dilute the vinegar, though the recipe does not say so; something like it survives in modern recipes as a measured salting step. What does not survive is the casual attitude to sealing, written before home canning guidance was standardised and before acidity was something a home cook was expected to measure.