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Gherkins
Put some gherkins into a stone jar and cover them with strong brine adding a small piece of alum to prevent them losing color. When they have been soaking for seven or eight days take them out, put them into fresh water and leave them for two or three days in that. Boil some malt vinegar in a saucepan and let it get nearly cold. Take the gherkins out of the water and put them in a large pan, pour the cold vinegar over them, and they are ready for use. Cloves, allspice, cinnamon and mustard may be added to the vinegar before boiling, if desired.
Herb Flavoring for Sauce, Soups and Stews Remove all the stalks from one ounce of dried thyme, sweet basil, marjoram and bay-leaves, pound them in a mortar with one ounce each of grated nutmeg, ground mace, cloves, and white pepper. Pass the whole through a fine sieve, and bottle.
Two entries run together here: a brined-then-vinegared gherkin pickle and a dry herb-and-spice blend. The gherkins cannot be recommended as written; the flavouring powder is harmless and still worth making.
- No measured brine, no measured acid"Strong brine" and "malt vinegar" give neither a salt percentage nor an acetic acid strength. Unprocessed vinegar pickles are safe only when the finished brine is reliably acidic, and nothing here lets you know whether it is. Modern malt vinegars vary from about 4 to 6 percent, and cucumbers soaked for days in fresh water carry a great deal of dilution into the jar.
- No heat processing, no sealThe vinegar is boiled and then deliberately cooled before it goes over the raw cucumbers, and the pan is simply left open for use. Nothing in the sequence brings the packed jar to a temperature that kills spoilage organisms, and the recipe never says to refrigerate. Follow a current tested pickling recipe instead.
- AlumPotassium alum was a common crisping agent in nineteenth-century pickling and appears in many British household books of the era. It is no longer recommended for home pickles: it contributes nothing to safety, can give a puckering off-taste, and repeated dietary aluminium is best avoided.
- Ten or eleven days at room temperatureSeven or eight days in brine plus two or three in plain fresh water is a long unrefrigerated hold. The freshening stage in particular is close to plain water at ambient temperature, which is the least protective condition in the whole process.
- The stone jarA "stone jar" is a stoneware crock, not a modern canning jar. The recipe describes no seal or closure at any stage, which tells you the original was never intended as a sealed shelf-stable preserve.
- The herb flavouring is a different matterRead as an ounce of each herb, the mix comes to roughly half a pound of powder before sieving; the wording may equally mean an ounce of the four herbs together, which would give about five ounces. It is safe to make and keeps a few months in a stoppered jar; grate the nutmeg fresh, since pre-ground nutmeg loses its aroma quickly.
- Using the powderThe original gives no dosage. Treat it like a strong quatre épices: a quarter to half a teaspoon per quart of soup or stew, added early enough for the woody herbs to soften but not so early that the cloves dominate.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book was compiled at the Waldorf, but a great deal of it is straight household cookery of the period, and this page is a good example: the gherkin method is essentially the English pickle found in Victorian domestic manuals, malt vinegar, alum and stone crock included. Gherkins in America of this date could mean either small pickling cucumbers or the true West Indian burr gherkin, Cucumis anguria, which was also grown for pickling, though how much of the trade it accounted for is unclear. The two-stage treatment, a long salt brine followed by a freshening soak, was a common way to draw water out of the fruit and firm it before the vinegar went on, and the alum was there for colour and crispness at a time when a vividly green pickle was a mark of skill, sometimes achieved by less benign means such as copper pans. The herb powder that follows belongs to the same tradition of the well-stocked storeroom: a single bottled seasoning kept on hand so that a cook could flavour a sauce or a stockpot without opening eight separate tins.