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Pickled Cucumbers
Prepare and quarter ripe cucumbers, take out seeds, clean, lay in brine that will float an egg nine days, stirring every day, take out and put in clear water one day, lay in alum-water (a lump of alum size of a medium hulled hickory-nut to a gallon of water) over night, make syrup of a pint good cider vinegar, pound brown sugar, two table-spoons each broken cinnamon bark, mace, and pepper grains; make syrup (three pints of sugar to a quart of vinegar) enough to cover the slices, lay them in, and cook till tender. -Mrs. M. L. France.
A nine-day salt cure followed by a spiced sweet vinegar syrup — the older, slower style of sweet pickle, written for cooks who had no refrigeration and a glut of overgrown cucumbers. The quantities are given twice and do not quite agree; the parenthetical ratio is the one to follow.
- The conflicting syrup measuresThe pint of vinegar and pound of sugar are a sample batch; the parenthesis (three pints sugar to one quart vinegar) is the working ratio, scaled up until the syrup covers the fruit. Treat the spice quantities as being for about that quart of vinegar and increase proportionally.
- Brine that will float an eggAn egg-float brine is roughly 10 percent salt by weight, on the order of 1/3 to 1/2 cup pickling salt per quart of water, though the exact point varies with the age of the egg. Mix, test with an egg, and adjust; use pickling or kosher salt, since iodized salt clouds the brine and anti-caking agents leave sediment.
- Ripe cucumbersHere "ripe" means fully mature and yellowing, with hard seeds and thick skin — not the young slicers sold today. Large overgrown garden cucumbers are the right thing; "clean" most likely means scraping the seed cavity out completely, though the recipe does not say whether to peel.
- AlumPickling alum (potassium aluminum sulfate) was the standard crisping agent and is still sold, though it is no longer recommended: too much makes the pickle astringent and puckery. A calcium chloride pickle crisp, or simply skipping the step, gives a better result.
- DesaltingOne day in clear water is a minimum for cucumbers this heavily brined. Change the water two or three times and taste a piece before it goes into the syrup; over-salted fruit cannot be corrected later.
- Pepper grains and macePepper grains are whole black peppercorns. Mace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as blade mace or ground; blade is what "broken" implies here. Tie the spices in cloth if you do not want them in the finished jar.
- Cook till tenderA gentle simmer of 20 to 30 minutes, until a piece is translucent and yields to a knife tip. A hard boil breaks mature cucumber flesh down into mush, and the sugar syrup scorches easily once it thickens.
- Keeping themNo sealing or processing is described, because the salt, sugar and vinegar were the preservation. Pack into clean jars, cover with the hot syrup, and keep them refrigerated; for shelf-stable jars follow a current tested pickle recipe with a measured processing time.
Sweet pickles of this kind belong to the long-brine tradition that ran through American household cookery before home canning was standardized: cucumbers were salted down at the end of the season in a crock, held for weeks or months, then freshened and finished in spiced syrup as they were wanted. The nine-day salt stage is a preservation step, not a flavoring one, and the alum bath answers the softening that follows it. The Dixie Cook Book credits many of its receipts to a contributor — Mrs. M. L. France here — and assumes a reader who already knows what a brine strong enough to float an egg feels like, which is why so much of the measuring is left to the egg and the eye. Cinnamon, mace and whole pepper were common sweet-pickle spicings of the period.