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Pickled Corn
Pluck the corn while still unripe and about the size of the little finger. Peel off the leaves, and lay the ears in a pickle-jar, with a few small pieces of basilicum and a few bay-leaves mixed with them. Put enough vinegar in a saucepan over the fire to cover, and when boiling pour it over the corn. When the vinegar has cooled tie a piece of wet parchment or thick paper over the top of the jar, and leave for a fortnight or so before using the pickle.
This is a shelf-stored vegetable pickle written before anyone measured acidity, and the gap between what it says and what a tested recipe requires is the whole problem. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method itself does not hold up.
- Why it fails: corn is low-acidSweet corn, even picked immature, sits well above the pH at which Clostridium botulinum is inhibited. Safety in a pickle of this kind depends entirely on the finished brine holding the whole jar at or below pH 4.6, and nothing here measures or guarantees that.
- Why it fails: the vinegar is unspecifiedThe recipe says only "enough vinegar to cover." No strength is given, and nineteenth-century household vinegar ranged widely, some of it well under the 5 percent acetic acid modern tested recipes assume. Hot vinegar poured over cold ears also dilutes as the corn gives up water, dropping the acidity further.
- Why it fails: no heat process, no sealA sheet of wet parchment tied over the mouth of a jar is a dust cover, not a hermetic closure. There is no boiling-water process, and the jar is then left at room temperature for two weeks or more. Any current pickling recipe with tested proportions and a processing time should be used instead.
- BasilicumSimply basil, from the Latin ocimum basilicum; a modern text would write sweet basil.
- "The size of the little finger"These are immature ears, comparable to what a supermarket now sells as baby corn, perhaps two to three inches and picked before the kernels fill out. Full-size cobs cut into rounds are not the same thing and behave differently in brine.
- A fortnightTwo weeks. The recipe gives it simply as the interval to wait before using the pickle.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel and the compiler of this 1896 volume, gave over a substantial run of pages to pickles and relishes, which tells you how much of a hotel larder was still built on preserving in the 1890s. Pickled immature corn belongs to the same kitchen-garden tradition as pickled gherkins, nasturtium buds and green walnuts: the vegetable is taken deliberately before ripeness, when it is small enough to go whole into the jar and tender enough to take up vinegar. The basil and bay suit a New York hotel that was selling French service to American diners. It is worth reading as evidence of what a professional kitchen thought routine before commercial canning and food chemistry made ambient storage of low-acid vegetables a matter for measurement rather than judgement.