Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pickled Spanish Onions
Pickled Spanish Onions
Peel some onions, cut a small round piece out of the bottom of each and scoop out a little of the inside. Put them in a vessel with salt and water to cover and let them remain for two or three days, changing the water two or three times. Afterwards drain and stuff the onions as follows: First put in a little ground mustard-seed, then some ginger with a little mace and shallot, add more mustard and fill up with grated horseradish. Replace the bottom pieces and bind the onions round with string to keep them in place. Make a strong pickle of white vinegar, mace, ginger, nutmeg, sliced horseradish and a little salt; put in the onions and let them boil up three times care being taken that they do not boil too much, for in that case they would lose their firmness and would not keep. Put them with the pickle into jars, leave them till the following day, then strain off the liquor, boil it up and pour it over the onions again. When the pickle is cold, tie the jars over first with wet bladder, and then with leather and keep them in a cool dry store-cupboard for use.
This is a nineteenth-century store-cupboard pickle written for a professional larder, and it cannot be reproduced safely as printed. The notes below explain what the instructions assume and where they fall short of current preserving practice.
- No quantities anywhereThe recipe names no volume of vinegar, no weight of salt, no ratio of pickle to onions and no acidity for the "strong pickle of white vinegar." Safe pickling depends on a known acid strength (commonly 5 percent acetic acid) held above the food in a known proportion; nothing here lets you verify that.
- The onions are hollowed and stuffedScooping out the centre and packing it with dry mustard, ginger, mace and grated horseradish creates a dense, low-acid core with a plug and string over it. Vinegar penetrates such a mass slowly and unevenly, so the interior can stay above the pH at which Clostridium botulinum is inhibited even while the surrounding liquor is sharply acid. Onions are a low-acid vegetable to begin with.
- "Let them boil up three times"This is a texture instruction, not a process. It gives no temperature, no hold time and no measure of heat penetration to the middle of a stuffed onion, and it is explicitly limited so the onions stay firm — that is, deliberately underprocessed by any modern standard.
- Days in unrefrigerated brineThe onions sit in salt water at room temperature for two or three days with the water changed a few times. The salt concentration is unspecified, so there is no way to know whether the brine is strong enough to control spoilage organisms during that stage.
- Bladder and leather are not a sealA wet pig's bladder shrinks as it dries and was a common air-excluding cover before screw-top glass. It is not a hermetic seal, it is not sterile, and it cannot be inspected for a vacuum. Tying leather over the top adds little barrier that matters microbiologically.
- Shelf storage was the whole pointThe pickle is meant to keep for months in a cool dry cupboard, which is precisely the condition under which an under-acidified, under-processed preserve becomes dangerous rather than merely spoiled. Spoilage in such jars is not always visible or malodorous.
- If you want stuffed pickled onionsUse a current tested recipe from a reliable preserving authority, with stated vinegar strength, jar size and processing time. That is the whole of the advice; this text should be read, not followed.
- Reading the ingredient listMace is the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and lighter than the seed itself. "Ground mustard-seed" is dry mustard powder; the recipe does not say how the shallot is to be prepared or in what form it goes in. Spanish onions are the large mild yellow globes, and their size suits a recipe that requires the onions to be hollowed out.
Stuffed pickled onions belong to the English pickling tradition that American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale — the same tradition that produced walnut ketchup, piccalilli and the long shelves of vinegar jars that a nineteenth-century larder was judged by. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, gathers a great deal of this kind of material: not dishes for a menu but the standing stock of the kitchen, made in quantity when produce was cheap and kept against the rest of the year. Bladder-and-leather covering was a common closure for preserves before the widespread adoption of the glass jar with a rubber-ringed lid; such covers were in use across a long period, so they do not date the method closely, and their appearance in a book of the 1890s may reflect a working practice carried over from older manuals. Spanish onions were imported large and mild and were valued in this period for their size and mildness.