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Pickled Garlic
Take one pound of garlic, remove the skin, divide them into cloves, put them on a flat dish or board and sprinkle over with salt. Let them remain for two or three days, then wipe and put them in the open air to dry. Put one ounce each of peppercorns and bruised mustard seeds into a saucepan with one quart more of vinegar and add a little salt, set the pan on the fire, boil, skim well and plunge the garlic in, taking care that it is entirely covered with the vinegar. Let it remain in for three minutes, allow the liquor to cool, and put it in a large jar. Tie the jar down securely with skin or wet parchment, and it can then be stored for use.
A straight vinegar pickle of the old school: salt first to draw out water, then a brief hot-vinegar bath. The instructions are compressed and one measurement is garbled, so read the notes before starting.
- The hinge: keep the garlic submergedEverything about the keeping quality depends on the cloves sitting fully under vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity. Any clove that bobs above the surface will soften and spoil, so weight the garlic down or top up with more vinegar.
- "One quart more of vinegar"The word "more" has nothing to refer back to: no earlier step in this recipe calls for vinegar, so it is probably a stray from an adjoining step or recipe. Read it as one quart of vinegar, which is roughly enough to cover a pound of peeled cloves.
- A pound of garlicRoughly six to eight average heads, giving something over two cups of peeled cloves. Peeling that quantity by hand is the real work of the recipe; a brief soak in warm water loosens the skins.
- Salt quantityThe original says only "sprinkle over with salt," leaving the amount to the cook. A generous even coating appears to be the intention -- a couple of tablespoons of coarse salt for the pound will do -- and its job is to draw out moisture, not to season.
- The two or three days of saltingDo this in the refrigerator on a rimmed tray rather than on an open board in a warm kitchen. Pour off the liquid that collects and pat the cloves dry before they go into the vinegar.
- Three minutes in the boiling liquorTake the three minutes as written rather than extending it; a longer boil tends to soften the cloves and dull their bite.
- Bruised mustard seedCrack the seeds lightly with the flat of a knife or a mortar rather than grinding them; whole seeds release very little, powdered mustard clouds the brine.
- "Tie the jar down with skin or wet parchment"A bladder or parchment cover shrinks tight as it dries. Use a modern glass jar with a plastic-lined or plastic lid instead, as bare metal corrodes in vinegar.
- StorageGive it three to four weeks before eating and keep it in the refrigerator rather than a cupboard. Blue-green tints in pickled garlic are a harmless pigment reaction, not spoilage.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the 1896 Waldorf book, worked at a moment when garlic was still faintly suspect in respectable American kitchens, associated with Italian, Spanish and Jewish immigrant cooking rather than with hotel dining rooms. Pickling it in spiced vinegar was a way of domesticating the bulb: the salt cure and the acid tame its raw pungency into something closer to the onions, walnuts and gherkins of the pickle chapters common in nineteenth-century household manuals. The method itself is older than the book and generic to that tradition, dry-salting to pull out water, then a scalding spiced vinegar poured or plunged over, then a cover of bladder or parchment tied down. The scale is small, a single pound, enough to garnish and season with, not to lay down for a winter.