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Preserved Cucumbers
Select small, well-formed cucumbers, boil for two or three minutes; take out of the water and pierce with a needle in three or four places and let drain. Allow to every pound of cucumber one pound of sugar and one pint of water; put all in a stewpan; add one stick of ginger and the rind of a lemon; simmer at side of the fire for about five minutes. Then take out the cucumbers and place in a jar; skim the syrup and pour over them; cover the jar tightly and let stand for two or three days. Strain off the syrup, give it another boiling, pour it again over the cucumbers, tie a bladder on the jar and keep in a cool place.
This is a sweetmeat rather than a pickle — cucumbers candied slowly in a ginger-lemon syrup — and it belongs to a family of preserves that modern food science has ruled out of the home kitchen. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method fails.
- Why it fails: a low-acid vegetable with no acidCucumber is low-acid, and nothing here — no vinegar, no lemon juice, only the rind — brings the pH down. A sealed jar of low-acid vegetables held at room or cellar temperature is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum, which produces toxin without any smell or visible spoilage.
- Why it fails: the sugar is too dilute to preserveOne pound of sugar to one pound of cucumber plus a full pint of water gives a syrup far below the roughly 65-70% soluble solids that makes a preserve self-protecting. Two brief boilings of a few minutes each will not concentrate it, and the cucumbers themselves are mostly water, diluting it further.
- Why it fails: no processing stepFive minutes at a simmer, followed by days standing at room temperature, is not a heat process. There is no boiling-water bath, no pressure processing, no recorded temperature or time — the three things any current preserving recipe specifies. Use a tested modern recipe from a current preserving guide instead.
- The bladder sealA pig's bladder, soaked soft and tied over the jar mouth, dried to an airtight skin as it shrank. It excludes air but is not sterile and cannot be heat-processed, so it seals in whatever the jar already contained.
- "Simmer at side of the fire"On a coal range the hottest zone was over the firebox; the side plates ran gentler. It means a bare simmer, the equivalent of a low burner, not a rolling boil.
- Stewpan and stick of gingerA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan, ideally non-reactive here. A "stick" of ginger is a piece of dried whole root, perhaps two inches, not the ground spice and not a fresh knob.
- The needlePricking the blanched cucumbers is the one bit of technique worth understanding: it lets syrup move into the flesh and water move out, which is how candied fruit is made.
Sweet cucumber preserves were once ordinary. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American household books treat the cucumber as a fruit for candying alongside citron, angelica and green walnuts, and the closely related "mangoes" — cucumbers or melons hollowed, stuffed with spice and steeped in syrup or vinegar — appear in American cookbooks from the colonial period onward. Ginger and lemon rind here are the standard aromatics of that tradition, meant to give a bland, watery vegetable some character once the sugar has replaced its moisture. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) collected the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, and its preserving section suggests, though it does not prove, a hotel larder that still put up its own sweetmeats; the bladder cover, a method still in use at the date, belongs to a practice that predated the glass canning jar.