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Pickled Onions
Put the desired quantity of small onions into hot water and then peel them; place them in fresh salted water with a small piece of alum in it, and leave them until the following day; drain off the water, add more fresh water with more salt and alum and leave them a day longer. Afterwards drain and put them into jars, placing in each jar one or two blades of mace, one or two red-peppers, a few white peppercorns and a small quantity of horseradish. Pour in sufficient vinegar to cover the onions well, cork the jars, cover with parchment, tie them down and keep in a dry store-cup-board. In a month they will be ready for use.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle of the old English type, written for a kitchen that assumed a cool dry larder and cooks who knew their brine by feel. Two things need translating: the alum, and the total absence of measurements.
- The hinge: keep the onions submergedEverything about the keeping quality depends on the onions staying fully under vinegar. Any shoulder left proud of the liquid will soften and spoil, so weight them down with a small glass disc or a folded round of parchment pressed below the surface.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard crisping agent for pickles well into the twentieth century, and food-grade pickling alum is still sold. It is no longer recommended for onions or cucumbers: it does little that a fresh, firm onion and cold brine will not do, and it can leave a puckering astringency. Leave it out and rely on good onions.
- SaltNo quantity is given. About 1 cup of pickling salt to 1 gallon of water makes a workable salting brine; use non-iodised salt, since iodised salt clouds the liquid and can darken the onions.
- VinegarUse vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity, which is the modern standard and the whole basis of the pickle's safety. Malt vinegar is traditional for British-style pickled onions; cider or distilled white both work. Do not dilute it.
- Blades of maceA blade is a whole piece of the lacy aril from around a nutmeg. If you can only find ground mace, use a scant quarter teaspoon per quart jar and expect a cloudier brine.
- Red-peppersAlmost certainly whole dried red chillies rather than fresh or sweet peppers. One or two small ones per jar gives warmth rather than heat.
- OnionsSmall pickling or cocktail onions, roughly 1 inch across; about 2 lb fills a quart jar. The hot-water dip is to loosen the skins, so keep it brief and peel while warm, trimming the root end flat but not deep enough to let the layers fall apart.
- Jars and storageCorks and tied parchment do not seal. Use clean canning jars with two-piece lids or glass-and-gasket jars, and store this unprocessed pickle in the refrigerator rather than a cupboard, where it will keep several months. For shelf-stable pickled onions, follow a current tested recipe with a measured hot-water-bath process.
- TimingThe month is real. The onions are harsh and raw before then; three to four weeks is the minimum for the vinegar to penetrate and the spice to spread.
Pickled onions are an English larder staple, and Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of them in a Waldorf book of 1896 says something about what a great hotel kept on hand. The two-day salting is the crucial old technique, drawing water out of the onions so the vinegar is not weakened by it and the flesh stays crisp. Alum's use as a hardener for pickles is very old and was already being questioned by the late nineteenth century, when domestic-science writers began arguing that firm fresh vegetables and strong vinegar made it unnecessary; it survived in print for decades after that, and here is Oscar still calling for it twice.