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Sweet Cucumber Pickles
Sweet cucumber pickles made by the following recipe will keep for several years without being sealed: Place the cucumbers, which should be very small, in a weak brine over night. Next morning remove the cucumbers scald the brine, turn it over the pickles and let them stand for two days. Repeat this process on the third morning, let the pickles stand for two days longer, and then scald the brine (removing the pickles as before) each morning until the eighth day. Then take enough vinegar to cover the pickles, and add a little molasses, enough sugar to make the vinegar as sweet as desired, and cinnamon, allspice, and cloves to taste. Remove the pickles from the brine, place them in the seasoned vinegar, heat thoroughly, and place in jars.
This is a period preservation method rather than a cooking recipe, and every number that would make it safe is missing. The points below explain where it fails by current standards; a tested modern pickling recipe should be used instead.
- "Weak brine" is not a measurementSalt concentration is the only thing controlling which microbes grow during the eight-day hold. Without a stated weight of salt to a stated volume of water, the brine may be far too weak to suppress spoilage organisms, and the cucumbers sit at room temperature for over a week.
- The repeated scalding is a hazard, not a safeguardDraining the brine off, boiling it, and pouring it back over cool cucumbers every morning leaves the vegetables cycling through the warm range where bacteria multiply fastest. The heat is applied to the liquid, never held on the product long enough to matter.
- Vinegar strength is unspecifiedSafe pickling depends on finished acidity, generally an acetic acid level of at least 5 percent in the covering liquid. Household vinegar in 1911 varied widely in strength, and here it is further diluted by sugar, molasses and the water carried in by the cucumbers, with no way to know where the final pH lands.
- "Heat thoroughly, and place in jars" is not canningThere is no processing step, no boiling-water bath, no stated jar or lid preparation, and the headnote explicitly says the jars need not be sealed. Sugar and vinegar alone are not a reliable barrier in an unsealed container.
- "Will keep for several years" should not be testedWith no measured salt, no known vinegar strength and no seal, there is no way to say what the finished acidity is or whether the pickles are preserved at all. Improperly acidified home-preserved vegetables are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and botulinum toxin is odourless and tasteless; spoilage is not always visible.
- Terms in the textThe recipe calls for only "a little" molasses, with sugar added separately to sweeten to taste. Cinnamon, allspice and cloves are a common combination in period sweet-pickle recipes; the text does not say whether the spices were whole or ground, or whether they were bagged.
- If you want the flavourSweet spiced gherkins of this style are still made, but by a modern recipe with weighed salt, 5 percent vinegar and a timed boiling-water process. Use one.
Sweet cucumber pickles of this type were a fixture of American household books from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the multi-day brine-and-scald routine reflects a kitchen with no refrigeration and no reliable jar seal. The Mason jar existed by the time the Butterick Cook Book appeared, though open crocks weighted under a plate are often said to have remained in use, which may be why the recipe advertises keeping "without being sealed" as a selling point rather than a warning. The daily scalding is generally understood as a way to keep the brine sound and draw water out of the cucumbers so they would firm rather than soften; the sequence was passed down by habit and by pattern-book publishers like Butterick. What the method lacks is the one thing preservation science later insisted on: a measured acid level in the finished jar.