Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Green Pickles
Green Pickles
Make a brine of salt and water strong enough to float a fresh egg, and put in it the vegetables to be pickled, green tomatoes, gherkins, snap beans, cucumbers, etc., and let them remain in it for a fortnight (a longer time will not hurt them). They must be well covered with grape leaves, and sufficient weight must be put on them to keep them well down under the brine. When the vegetables are taken out of this brine they must be steeped in weak vinegar for several days, then put over the fire in two quarts of strong vinegar (which quantity will be sufficient for four quarts of vegetables), two ounces of long pepper, two ounces of mustard-seed, one ounce of celery-seed, one-half an ounce each of cloves and mace, three red pepper pods, one tablespoonful of grated horseradish, and sugar to taste; when this boils have the pickles drained from the weak vinegar and put into jars, and pour the vinegar over them boiling hot.
This is salt-stock pickling, the two-stage method that was standard before refrigeration: vegetables are held in heavy brine for weeks, freshened, then finished in spiced vinegar. Everything hinges on the brine being strong enough and the vegetables staying submerged.
- The egg-float brineA brine strong enough to float a fresh egg is a heavy one; it is usually reckoned at somewhere around 10 percent salt by weight, though the egg test is rough and varies with the egg. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt and its anti-caking agents can cloud the brine and darken the vegetables.
- Keeping them underAnything that bobs above the brine will mold or soften, and the fortnight is wasted. A plate weighted with a water-filled jar works; check every few days and skim any scum, topping up with fresh brine of the same strength rather than plain water.
- Why grape leavesThey are not decorative. Grape leaves are high in tannin, which inhibits the enzymes that turn cucumbers and gherkins soft. Blackcurrant, oak or sour cherry leaves do the same job, as does trimming the blossom end off every cucumber.
- The weak vinegar steepThis step draws the excess salt out and is not optional — skip it and the pickles are inedibly salty. Several changes of diluted vinegar (roughly half vinegar, half water) over three or four days; taste a piece before you commit to the spicing.
- Long pepperPiper longum, a catkin-shaped relative of black pepper, sold by spice merchants and Indian groceries. If you cannot find it, whole black peppercorns are the nearest substitute. Two ounces of spice is a lot by modern habit — tie the whole lot in cheesecloth so you can pull it out.
- Proportions and pansTwo quarts vinegar to four quarts prepared vegetables, which fills roughly four to five quart jars. Boil the spiced vinegar in stainless or enameled ware; unlined copper and brass react with acid, and cast iron blackens the pickles.
- StoragePouring boiling vinegar over jars and calling them sealed is open-kettle canning, long since abandoned. Treat these as refrigerator pickles and eat them within a couple of months; if you want them shelf-stable, follow a current tested waterbath procedure for pickle brine strength and processing time.
The two-stage method Oscar describes was the backbone of the nineteenth-century American pickle trade: cucumbers went into salt stock in barrels at harvest, where they kept for a year or more, and were freshened and spiced in batches as needed, which is why commercial pickle houses could sell in February. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, and it carries a good deal of this sort of larder work alongside the hotel's à la carte cookery — a reminder that even a Fifth Avenue kitchen still put up its own pickles by the crock.