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Sweet Pickles (May be made of any fruit)
Sweet pickles may be made of any fruit that can be preserved, including the rinds of ripe melons and cucumbers. The proportion of sugar to vinegar for syrup is three pints to a quart. Sweet pickles may be made of any preserve by boiling over the syrup and adding spices and vinegar. Examine frequently, and re-scald the syrup if there are signs of fermentation. Piums and other smoothskinned fruits should be well pricked before cooking. The principal spices for sweet pickles are cinnamon and cloves. Use "coffee C," best brown, or good stirred maple sugar.
This is a master formula rather than a single recipe, and the part it leaves out is the part that matters: how the finished jars are sealed and kept. Read the points on preservation before anything else.
- Why the method failsThe instruction to "examine frequently, and re-scald the syrup if there are signs of fermentation" tells you plainly that the pack was never expected to be shelf-stable. There is no jar preparation, no headspace, no processing time and no temperature anywhere in the text, and re-boiling a syrup that has already begun to ferment does not undo spoilage. Use a current tested sweet-pickle recipe if you want to put fruit up for storage.
- The acid is never actually specifiedNineteenth-century vinegar was not of standardized strength, and the recipe gives no dilution, no fruit weight and no final quantity. Because the sugar-to-vinegar ratio is fixed but the volume of fruit is not, the acidity of the finished syrup is unknowable, which is precisely what a preserving recipe has to control.
- Coffee C sugar"Coffee C" was a commercial grade of soft, moist, light-brown sugar, sold cheap; the letters ran A, B, C from palest to darkest, and the name is usually explained by its use in coffee. Light or medium brown sugar is the nearest thing on a modern shelf. "Stirred maple sugar" is maple sugar worked while cooling until it grains.
- The proportionsThree pints of sugar to one quart of vinegar is a heavy syrup, close to 1.5 parts sugar to 1 part vinegar by volume. Sugar here was measured by the pint as often as by the pound; three pints of granulated sugar is about 2 lb 10 oz.
- Pricking the fruitPlums, damsons and cherries do need pricking or they burst and shed their skins in hot syrup. A darning needle or skewer, several holes to each fruit, is the traditional tool.
- Melon and cucumber rinds"Rinds of ripe melons" most often means watermelon rind, the firm white layer with the green skin pared off and the pink flesh cut away, though other melon rinds were pickled the same way. Ripe cucumbers are the yellow, overgrown ones, peeled and seeded — not the small pickling sort.
- SpicesCinnamon and cloves would ordinarily have been used whole, in stick and bud form. Ground spice muddies the syrup and turns it grey-brown; if you are following the flavour profile in a modern recipe, tie whole spice in muslin.
Sweet pickling — fruit cooked in a sugar-and-vinegar syrup with warm spice — reached American kitchens from English preserved and "pickled" fruits, and is often said to have been reinforced by German süss-sauer cookery in Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley; by the time The Dixie Cook-Book appeared in the 1880s it was a standard category with its own chapter in many general household manuals. The blanket instruction that any fruit which can be preserved can be sweet-pickled reflects how these books were used: the cook already knew how to put up peaches, and the sweet pickle was simply that same syrup pushed toward vinegar and cloves to accompany ham, cold roast meats and game. The mention of melon and ripe-cucumber rinds is the frugal heart of the practice, turning the part of the fruit that would otherwise go to the hogs into a relish; watermelon rind pickle survives as a Southern preserve on exactly that logic. The direction to re-scald the syrup at the first sign of fermentation is a reminder that preserves were watched all winter rather than sealed and forgotten.