Bean Pickles
Pick green beans of the best variety, when young and tender, string; and place in a kettle to boil, with salt to taste, until they ; and place in a kettle to boil, with salt to taste, until they can be pierced with a fork, drain well through a colander, put in a stone jar, sprinkle with cayenne pepper, and cover with strong cider vinegar ; sugar may be added if desired.
A plain crock pickle: beans cooked soft, salted, peppered and drowned in vinegar. The text as printed contains a printer's repetition ("with salt to taste, until they" appears twice), so read it as one instruction.
- Cook them lessBoiling until a fork pierces the bean easily gives a limp pickle by modern taste. Three to four minutes in boiling salted water, then an immediate drain, keeps enough snap to survive the vinegar.
- "Strong cider vinegar"This most likely meant full-strength vinegar as it came from the barrel, rather than vinegar cut with water for the table; barrel strength varied, so no exact modern equivalent can be given. Commercial cider vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity is the practical substitute; do not thin it with water.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock, kept in a cold cellar or pantry. A glass jar in the refrigerator is the modern stand-in, and refrigeration is the sensible choice here since the recipe gives no measured brine strength or acidity.
- Do not treat this as canningThere is no sealing, processing or measured proportion of vinegar to beans. Keep the jar cold, eat within a few weeks, and use a tested, measured recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
- Salt and cayenneBoth are left to the cook. About a tablespoon of salt per quart of cooking water seasons the beans without curing them, and a quarter teaspoon of cayenne per quart of beans is assertive enough to notice.
- Sugar, if usedA tablespoon or two per pint of vinegar takes the raw edge off without making a sweet pickle. Stir it into the vinegar until dissolved before pouring, rather than sprinkling it over the beans.
- Beans to chooseYoung, slender, string-type beans with no developed seed inside. Older beans go leathery in vinegar, and the strings the recipe tells you to remove are largely absent from modern stringless varieties.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough working figure, two pounds of trimmed beans will fill one to two quart jars once cooked and drained, needing something under a quart of vinegar to cover.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of late nineteenth-century compilations edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox, whose Midwestern Buckeye collections were repeatedly reissued with regional titles and Southern contributions grafted on. Its pickle chapter is typical of the era: dozens of short, unmeasured entries assuming a cook who already knew how much vinegar a crock took. Pickled green beans of this kind were a way of holding a glut from the kitchen garden through the cold months before home canning equipment was common, and they resemble what the twentieth century came to call dilly beans, which are seasoned with dill and garlic rather than the plain cayenne used here. Cider vinegar dominates these books, most likely because it was the cheapest strong vinegar available to a household with apples, and its sharpness rather than any sealing process is what preserved the beans.