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Green Nectarine Pickles
Put a thin layer of salt on a dish, over this put a layer of green nectarines, then salt and more fruit, and continue in this way until as much fruit is used as is desired. Cover over with a thick coating of salt and let it remain for four or five days. Carefully take out the fruit, wipe dry and place in the sun for two or three days, turning frequently; then pack away in jars. Have ready a mixture sufficient to cover the fruit composed of one ounce each of white ginger, red peppers, allspice and cloves, one-half ounce of sugar, one shallot and six green peppers to each quart of vinegar. Let the vinegar boil for ten to fifteen minutes, remove from the fire, add and dissolve in it a very small quantity of alum, which will help to make the fruit crisp; when cold pour this over the fruit, then cover the jars and put away for use.
This is a nineteenth-century dry-salt-and-cold-vinegar fruit pickle of the Anglo-Indian type, and it is printed here as a document rather than as working instructions. The points below explain the units and the ingredients, and where the method falls outside anything a modern kitchen should attempt.
- No heat processing, no sealThe fruit is never cooked and the vinegar is poured over cold, after which the jars are simply "covered" and stored at room temperature indefinitely. There is no boiling-water bath, no measured headspace and no sealed lid, so nothing in the procedure controls mould, yeasts or spoilage organisms over months of storage.
- Vinegar of unknown strengthHousehold vinegar in 1896 was not standardised, and its acidity varied from batch to batch. Because the recipe gives no acidity, no fruit-to-brine ratio and no dilution, there is no way to know that the finished pack lands in the safe range for shelf storage.
- Two or three days in the open sunThe salted fruit is wiped dry and left outdoors, turned by hand, before packing. That step invites insects, dust and airborne moulds onto food that will then be stored without any kill step. It belongs to an era of orchard yards and cheesecloth, not to modern food handling.
- Unmeasured salt and unmeasured alumThe salt cure is described only as layers and "a thick coating," so the concentration that draws water out of the fruit is entirely guesswork. The alum, added as "a very small quantity" to keep the fruit crisp, is likewise unmeasured; potassium alum has largely dropped out of pickling for exactly this reason, since it is an astringent that is easy to overdose and produces a metallic, puckering flavour.
- What to make insteadIf you want a spiced pickle of hard unripe stone fruit, use a current tested recipe with stated vinegar acidity and a processing time. Read this one for the flavourings, not the method.
- Reading the ingredients"White ginger" is peeled, bleached dried ginger root, not the unpeeled black-skinned kind. "Red peppers" here almost certainly means dried hot chillies; the six "green peppers" are most likely fresh hot chillies rather than sweet bell peppers, though the recipe does not say. An ounce is by weight, so the spice load per quart of vinegar is very heavy by present-day taste.
- Green nectarinesThese are hard, immature fruit, most likely from the thinning of the crop, closer in texture to a green walnut or an unripe mango than to anything sold ripe today. Hard unripe stone fruit is not usually sold in modern shops.
Pickles of hard green fruit steeped in vinegar with ginger, cloves and chillies are often related to the Anglo-Indian mango-pickle tradition that British and American cooks had been adapting since the eighteenth century, substituting whatever unripe stone fruit the orchard gave them for the mangoes they could not get. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was ma tre d'h tel at the Waldorf, is far broader than a hotel service manual: alongside the dining-room cookery it carries a long stretch of domestic preserving of just this kind, a use for green fruit thinned from the trees that would otherwise be wasted. The alum is a period signature American p870s through the 1910s recommend it routinely for crispness, and it falls out of favour by the mid-twentieth century.