Home › Pickles › Cucumber Pickle
Cucumber Pickle
Slice green cucumbers as for the table; take one-third as many onions, sprinkle them with salt about a tablespoonful for a quart and let them stand over night; then drain thoroughly; put in bottles and shake them down; pour over cold cider vinegar enough to cover them. Take a half cup good salad oil, four large spoonfuls of pepper, two of mustard, put two tablespoonfuls of mixture on the top of a common-sized pickle bottle.
This is a cold-pack pickle in the old style: no boiling, no canner, just salt, vinegar and a spiced oil layer on top. Read it as a refrigerator pickle rather than a shelf-stable preserve.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleNothing here is heated and nothing is sealed, so there is no preservation beyond salt and acid. Pack into clean jars with lids, keep them in the refrigerator, and use within a few weeks.
- Vinegar strength mattersUse cider vinegar labelled 5% acidity, which is the modern standard. Vinegar of unknown strength, homemade or otherwise, is a poor basis for even a short-keeping pickle.
- Slice "as for the table"That is, thin rounds, the way cucumbers were served raw in a dish of vinegar; thin enough for the vinegar to penetrate. The recipe asks for one-third as many onions as cucumbers, sliced the same thickness.
- The salting is the hingeA tablespoon of salt per quart of sliced vegetables overnight draws out enough water to keep the slices crisp in the vinegar. Drain hard and press gently; leftover brine dilutes the vinegar and softens the pickle.
- "Four large spoonfuls of pepper, two of mustard"These are for the oil mixture, not for the jars, and the quantities are ambiguous in the original — read them as tablespoons of coarse black pepper and dry mustard beaten into the half cup of salad oil. Two tablespoons of that paste goes on top of each quart jar.
- The oil is a flavouring, not a sealA film of oil was sometimes thought to exclude air, but it should not be relied on to keep the pickle sound, and an oil cap on an unheated jar is a reason to keep it cold rather than in the pantry. Expect the oil to cloud or solidify in the refrigerator; it clears again at room temperature.
- "A common-sized pickle bottle"Probably something in the region of a quart, though the size is not specified. "Shake them down" means settle the slices by tapping the jar rather than tamping them, so the vinegar can run between the rounds.
- Yield and useThe original gives no quantities, so scale to the jars you have. The flavour is sharp and raw at first and mellows after a few days; serve as a relish with cold meat.
Sliced cucumber-and-onion pickles dressed with oil, mustard and pepper appear in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, sometimes under the name "oil pickles", and they share their cucumber-and-onion base and overnight salting with the sweeter mustard-and-turmeric pickles later marketed as bread and butter. The method belongs to a time when cider vinegar was a common household staple and when overnight salting was a usual way to firm summer vegetables before they met the acid. The oil layer reflects a belief that fat excluded air and so kept a pickle sound — not a notion to rely on, though the flavour survives. Books of this kind often carried a long run of pickle receipts, a stocked pickle shelf being one way a family got sharpness and variety onto the winter table.