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Pyfer Pickles
Salt pickles down dry for ten days, soak in fresh water one day; pour off water, place in porcelain kettle, cover with water and vinegar, and add a tea-spoon pulverized alum (to each gallon); set over night on a stove which had fire in during the day; wash and put in a jar with cloves, allspice, pepper, horse-radish and onions or garlic; boil fresh vinegar and pour over all; in two weeks they will be ready for use. These pickles are always fresh and crisp, and are made with much less trouble than in the old-fashioned way by keeping in brine. - Mrs. E. M. R.
This is a dry-salt cure followed by an unsealed vinegar pack, and the two steps that determine whether it is safe — how much salt, and how much vinegar — are both left unmeasured. The notes below explain the terms and why the method cannot be followed today.
- No measured salt in the cure"Salt pickles down dry for ten days" means layering cucumbers with dry salt in a crock and letting the drawn brine cover them. The safety of that ten days depends entirely on the salt concentration, and no quantity is given. Too little salt at room temperature ferments or spoils rather than cures.
- An unspecified acid ratio"Cover with water and vinegar" gives no proportion, and nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in strength, often homemade and untested. A pickle that ends up above about pH 4.6 is a low-acid food held at room temperature, which is the condition in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin.
- No heat process, no sealThe finished pickles go into a jar with hot vinegar poured over and are left two weeks before eating. The recipe specifies no boiling-water process, no sealed lid and no refrigeration, so nothing arrests spoilage organisms once the jar is opened and re-opened.
- The overnight stove step"Set over night on a stove which had fire in during the day" describes the cooling cast-iron range of a wood or coal kitchen — a slow drop from warm to cool over the course of the night. That is not a temperature anyone can reproduce or verify, and it is precisely the range in which pathogens multiply if the acid and salt are not doing their work.
- AlumA teaspoon of pulverized alum per gallon was the standard crisping agent of the period; potassium alum firms pectin in the cucumber skin. Food-grade alum still exists but modern pickling guidance has dropped it, partly for flavor — it leaves a metallic astringency — and partly because it is unnecessary when cucumbers are fresh and trimmed at the blossom end.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enameled cast-iron or granite-ware pan, specified because bare iron, copper and brass react with vinegar and discolor both the pickle and the pot. Stainless steel or enamel serves the same purpose.
- If you want these picklesUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service, which will specify salt by weight, vinegar at 5 percent acidity, and a processing time. Do not attempt to correct the proportions here by eye.
The Dixie Cook Book printed contributed recipes over initials — here Mrs. E. M. R. — and reproduced them essentially as received, kitchen shorthand and all. The interest of this one is its claim rather than its method: the writer is advertising a shortcut, pickles "made with much less trouble than in the old-fashioned way by keeping in brine," meaning the long fermented crock pickle that had to be watched, skimmed and freshened for weeks. Alum was the near-universal answer to the limp pickle, endorsed in print by household authorities well into the twentieth century before the science of acidity and safe processing caught up with the practice. What the recipe cannot supply is a number: home canning guidance built on measured salt, standardized vinegar and timed heat processing belongs to the decades after this book, and reading recipes like this one is a good reminder of how much of nineteenth-century preserving rested on a cook's hands and nose.