Home › Pickles › Pickled Onions
Pickled Onions
Select small silver-skinned onions, remove with a knife all the outer-skins, so that each onion will be perfectly white and clean. Put them into brine that will float an egg for three days, drain, place in jar, first a layer of onions three inches deep, then a sprinkling of horse-radish, cinnamon bark, cloves, and a little cayenne pepper; repeat until jar is filled, in proportion of half a tea-spoon cayenne pepper, two tea-spoons each chopped horse-radish and cloves, and four table-spoons cinnamon bark, to a gallon of pickles; bring vinegar to boiling point; add brown sugar in the proportion of a quart to a gallon, and pour hot over the onions. - Estelle Woods Wilcox.
A straightforward hot-vinegar pickle, but two things in it need translating: the salt brine is given as a float test rather than a measurement, and the spice quantities are scaled to a gallon of finished pickles.
- "Brine that will float an egg"This is the old strong-brine test, and it lands somewhere near a 10 percent salt solution — roughly a third to a half cup of plain salt dissolved per quart of water. Mix, then check with a raw egg in the shell: at the right strength it lifts off the bottom and floats. Use non-iodised salt, since iodine and anti-caking agents can cloud the brine.
- Silver-skinned onionsSmall white pearl onions or cippolini are the modern equivalent; look for ones no more than an inch across. Dropping them in boiling water for 30 seconds and then into cold water makes the skins slip off, which is far quicker than the knife the recipe assumes.
- Spice proportionsPer gallon of packed onions: 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, 2 teaspoons chopped horseradish, 2 teaspoons cloves, 4 tablespoons cinnamon bark. Use whole cloves and broken cinnamon sticks, not ground — ground spice turns the vinegar muddy and sludgy at the bottom of the jar.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar in the 1880s varied a good deal in acidity. Use a commercial cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent, which is the standard for pickling; enough to cover the onions completely, generally 2 to 3 quarts for a gallon jar.
- SugarA quart of brown sugar to a gallon is a heavily sweetened pickle by modern taste. Halving it gives a sharper result; the sugar is for flavour and body here, not preservation, so reducing it is safe.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleThe recipe gives no processing time and no sealing method — the hot vinegar is simply poured over raw onions in a jar. Cover, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator rather than a cupboard, and eat within a couple of months. For anything intended for shelf storage, follow a current tested canning procedure instead.
- Resting timeThe recipe gives no maturing time. Pickles of this kind are generally better for a wait: allow two to three weeks before opening so the horseradish and cayenne have time to spread through the brine.
- YieldA gallon of onions is roughly 5 to 6 pounds trimmed. The whole recipe scales down cleanly by quarters.
Estelle Woods Wilcox was the compiler of this book rather than a single household cook; she is best known for Buckeye Cookery, whose contents were reworked and reissued for a Southern market as The Dixie Cook-Book in the 1880s. Pickled onions belong to the older English tradition of small "sharp" pickles served alongside cold meat, cheese and boiled dinners, and the spicing here — cloves, cinnamon bark, cayenne and grated horseradish — is the standard American sweet-pickle register of the period, closer to a spiced chow-chow than to the plain malt-vinegar onion of a British pub. The long dry-salt or brine soak before the vinegar goes on was common in nineteenth-century pickle receipts: it pulls water out of the vegetable so the finished pickle stays crisp and does not dilute the vinegar, a bit of practical chemistry cooks may well have understood by result long before anyone explained it by osmosis.