No. 96

Gherkins

Cornichons

Cut off the stalks and ends from small gherkin cucumbers; put a few handfuls in a coarse towel or bag, with a heavy handful of kitchen salt, shake them in this bag to cleanse well and remove all the outer roughness and then toss them on a large sieve to free them of the salt; range in a barrel, pour over a brine made with sufficient salt to float an egg or a potato on its surface, cover, and on top lay a heavy weight to keep them under water; leave them so for six days. Now drain off the brine and return to the barrel more fresh brine, it containing as much salt as the first one; put back both cover and weight to keep them submerged under the liquid and leave stand in a cool place. After a short time a scum will form on the surface; this must in no ways be disturbed until the gherkins are needed, for it acts as a protector, preventing any air from penetrating into the liquid. When the gherkins are wanted for use, take them from the brine; unsalt by putting them in fresh water for twelve hours. Pour half water and half vinegar in an untinned copper basin, throw into it a small bagful of spices, such as cloves, peppers, mustard seeds and mace. Place on the fire and at the first boil, plunge in the well drained gherkins and leave to bubble for a few moments, then remove the basin from the fire and put both gherkins and vinegar into a large jar or barrel to cool off; put in with them a handful of tarragon, some small blanched onions and shallots and a few red peppers; stand this in a well aired place for a few days and the gherkins will be then ready for use.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's method is a two-stage process: a long salt brine for storage, then a hot spiced vinegar finish. The finishing step is the problem, and it is not incidental to the recipe.

The untinned copper basinBoiling half-and-half vinegar in bare copper dissolves copper into the liquid as copper acetate, and the gherkins then sit in that liquid to cool. Greening pickles in untinned copper was a known nineteenth-century practice — the copper fixes the chlorophyll and gives a bright green — and it was already being condemned by public analysts before Ranhofer's day. Copper salts cause vomiting and, with repeated exposure, liver and kidney damage; the amount taken up here cannot be known, and no amount of care makes an untinned copper acid pickle safe.
Why substituting a stainless pan is not a fixThe green colour that such copper-boiled pickles were prized for came from the copper itself, so changing the vessel will give a different result from the one intended. Either way, use a current, tested pickling recipe rather than trying to patch this one.
The brine and the scum"Enough salt to float an egg" lands somewhere near a 10 percent brine, but egg density varies and the recipe gives no weight, no temperature and no acidity check. It then instructs you to leave the surface scum entirely undisturbed for weeks or months. Surface growth on a slack brine can include moulds and yeasts that raise the pH and let spoilage organisms follow; modern practice is to skim, keep the vegetables fully submerged under a measured brine, and discard anything soft, slimy or off-smelling.
The twelve-hour fresheningThe recipe gives no temperature for the twelve-hour soak. In a cool larder or cellar that is one thing; in a modern kitchen at 70F it is twelve hours of unrefrigerated holding on the way to a product with no controlled acidity.
VocabularyCornichons are simply small pickling cucumbers, picked very small — an inch or two. "Unsalt" means to leach out the storage salt, as the recipe itself explains. "Range in a barrel" means to pack them in evenly, and the heavy weight holds them under the liquid.
What the recipe never givesNo quantity of gherkins, no volume of brine, no vinegar strength, no boiling time beyond "a few moments," and no yield. It is a working chef's aide-memoire for a kitchen that pickled by the barrel, not a set of instructions that can be followed as written.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in his "Elementary Methods" section — the shelf of stores and preparations a large restaurant kitchen made for itself rather than bought. Cornichons are the French pickle par excellence, small, firm and sharp, served with pâtés, cold meats and boiled beef, and a house that put out that kind of cold table needed them by the gallon. The two-stage method here — a long holding brine, then a spiced vinegar finish only when the pickles are wanted — was the standard commercial approach before reliable year-round refrigeration, since salt-stock cucumbers keep for many months and can be freshened and dressed in small batches. The untinned copper basin is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply: greening pickles in copper was widespread in French practice and was one of the specific adulterations that drove food-purity legislation on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades either side of 1900.