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Sweet Pickles (Their season but they can be)
in their season, but they can be prepared very nicely at any time, by taking pear, peach, plum, or apple preserves, and pouring hot spiced vinegar over them; in a few days they will make a delightful relish. It very often happens in putting up cucumber pickles that you can only gather or buy a few at a time; these can be easily pickled in the following manner: Place in a jar, sprinkle with salt, in the proportion of a pint salt to a peck cucumbers, cover with boiling water, let stand twenty-four hours, drain, cover with fresh hot water; after another twenty-four hours, drain, place in a jar, and cover with cold, not very strong vinegar; continue to treat each mess in this manner, using the two jars, one for scalding and the other as a final receptacle for the pickles, until you have enough, when drain and cover with boiling cider vinegar, add spices, and in a few days they will be ready for use.
Never throw away even
This is a fragment of a longer pickling entry, and it covers two different things: a shortcut sweet pickle made from finished preserves, and a running method for accumulating cucumber pickles a handful at a time. The second method is the problem.
- Why this one failsThe cucumbers are held in a covered jar under "cold, not very strong vinegar" at room temperature, with new batches added over days or weeks, before a final covering of boiling vinegar. Nothing here specifies acidity, salt concentration by weight, or a storage temperature, and vinegar of unknown and deliberately reduced strength cannot be relied on to hold a vegetable pack safely acidic. Use a current tested pickle recipe with a stated 5 percent acetic acid vinegar and a measured brine.
- The brine is too light to fermentNot a curing brine -- A pint of salt to a peck of cucumbers is roughly a pound of salt to ten or twelve pounds of vegetable, but the covering water is not measured, so the strength of the brine cannot be worked out. The cucumbers are scalded and drained twice, so the salting is there to draw water and firm the flesh rather than to cure or ferment.
- PeckA dry peck is eight quarts, about 10 to 12 lb of small pickling cucumbers. A pint of salt is around 1 lb of coarse salt, and more if fine, since fine salt packs denser.
- "Each mess"Mess here means simply a batch or a picking, whatever the garden yielded that day. The two-jar system is a scalding jar and a keeping jar, so the vinegar in the keeping jar is repeatedly disturbed and diluted as fresh cucumbers arrive.
- The preserve shortcutThe first sentence is a different proposition: already-cooked, heavily sugared pear, peach, plum or apple preserves with hot spiced vinegar poured over. Sugar concentration in nineteenth-century preserves was generally high enough to do real preservative work; the recipe itself says only that the result will be ready in a few days, and says nothing about longer storage.
- SpicesThe recipe never names them. Sweet-pickle spice for fruit in books of this period was commonly whole cloves, stick cinnamon, allspice and sometimes mace, often tied in a cloth so the vinegar does not darken.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compilations that grew out of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, reworked in the 1880s for a Southern market, and its pickle chapter reflects a kitchen tied directly to a kitchen garden rather than a market. The running-jar method answers a practical problem: cucumbers do not ripen all at once, and a household picking a few a day could not wait for a peck to arrive before starting. Sweet pickles proper -- fruit in spiced, sweetened vinegar -- were a fixture of the Southern relish tray and were often served alongside cold meat and ham, where the sugar-and-vinegar sharpness did the work a chutney or a fruit sauce does now. The opening line, offering preserves as a year-round substitute for seasonal fruit, is a small window on the period's larder logic: a jar of peach preserves was among the closest things available to out-of-season fruit, and turning it back into something savoury was a thrifty second use. The truncated closing phrase, "Never throw away even," may have begun an instruction about saving leftover spiced vinegar, advice that appears in other books of the era, but the text breaks off and the continuation is not recoverable here.