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Pickled Cucumbers
Mrs. Packard.
Wash with care your cucumbers, and place in jars.
Make a weak brine (a handful of salt to a gallon and a half of water). When scalding hot, turn over the cucumbers and cover; repeat this process three mornings in succession, taking care to skim thoroughly. On the fourth day have ready a porcelain kettle of vinegar, to which has been added a piece of alum the size of a walnut. When scalding hot, put in as many cucumbers as may be covered with the vinegar; do not let them boil, but skim off as soon as scalded through, and replace with others, adding each time a small piece of alum. When this process is through, throw out the vinegar and replace with good cider or white wine vinegar; add spices, mustard seed, and red peppers. Sort the pickles and place in stone or glass jars, turn over the hot spiced vinegar; seal and put away the jars not needed for immediate use. Pickles thus prepared are fine and crisp at the expiration of a year. Those that are kept in openmouth jars may be covered with a cloth, which will need to be taken off and rinsed occasionally. I prefer green peppers, and prepare them with cucumbers in brine.
They are not as apt to become soft.
This is a preserving procedure rather than a dish, and it depends on a chain of assumptions about brine strength, vinegar acidity and sealing that no longer hold. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method cannot be followed today.
- The brine is not a preserving brineA handful of salt to a gallon and a half of water gives a weak brine — perhaps one to three percent, depending on what a handful is taken to be — enough to draw water out of the cucumbers and start them softening, nowhere near the 5 to 10 percent used for genuine brine curing. The cucumbers sit for four days in a liquid that will not suppress spoilage organisms, which is why the recipe has to insist on daily scalding and skimming.
- AlumPotassium aluminum sulfate, a common nineteenth-century grocery item used as a crisping agent for pickles. It firms the pectin in the cucumber skin. Current preserving guidance drops it entirely; repeated doses of the size described here can give a puckery, astringent flavor and add no keeping power.
- Unmeasured vinegar"Good cider or white wine vinegar" of this period was of unknown and variable strength, often home-made. Safe vinegar pickling depends on a known acidity — 5 percent — and on enough of it relative to the vegetable. Nothing here specifies either, so the finished acidity of the jars is unknowable.
- "Seal and put away"This means pouring hot vinegar into a jar and closing it, with no boiling-water processing at all. The heat of the liquid alone does not reliably sterilize the jar, the lid or the cucumber interiors, and the vacuum such a seal produces is unpredictable. A jar that looks sealed may not be.
- A year in the pantry, and the open-jar optionStorage for twelve months rests entirely on the acid and salt being strong enough, which they are not. The alternative offered — an open-mouth jar under a cloth that is rinsed "occasionally" — is an invitation to surface yeasts and molds, which raise the pH of the brine as they grow and open the way for other organisms.
- Porcelain kettleAn enameled cast-iron or earthenware-lined pan. The point was to avoid bare copper, brass or iron, which vinegar attacks; older pickle recipes sometimes exploited that reaction deliberately to green the fruit, with dangerous results. Any nonreactive pan answers the same purpose.
- If you want pickles like theseUse a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength, a stated salt weight and a boiling-water processing time. That is the only part of this procedure that has genuinely changed, and it is the part that matters.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago, generally dated to 1874 with later editions following, from recipes contributed by named local women — Mrs. Packard here is one of them — and sold for the benefit of the Home for the Friendless, making it one of the earliest American charitable community cookbooks. Pickle chapters in books of this kind are unusually long, because a barrel or crock of cucumbers was one of the few sources of sharp flavor and green vegetable matter on a Midwestern winter table, and because every contributor had her own theory about crispness. Alum was the standard answer to that problem for most of the century, and it gradually disappeared from pickling recipes over the following decades. The green peppers noted at the end are prepared along with the cucumbers in the brine; the contrast is with the red peppers used as spicing.