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Cucumber Pickles (Two hundred little cucumber)
Two hundred little cucumber pickles; pour over them one pint of salt and one gallon of water. Let stand over night. Drain them. Put one gallon of vinegar, teaspoonful of powdered alum, two ounces of whole black pepper, two ounces of mustard seed, one and one-half cupfuls of brown sugar. Let the vinegar, alum and pickles come to a scald (not boil); then remove the pickles. Then add to the vinegar the pepper, mustard and sugar. Let it boil well and pour hot on pickles.
A straightforward vinegar pack for small whole cucumbers, written for a household putting up a barrel-sized batch. The quantities scale down cleanly, and the one instruction that carries the whole recipe is the word "scald."
- Scald, not boilThe cucumbers heat in the vinegar only until it steams, conventionally reckoned around 180F, then come straight out. Boiling them softens the flesh and you get soft, hollow pickles instead of crisp ones.
- Yield and scalingTwo hundred small cucumbers is roughly 12-15 lb, filling several quart jars. A quarter batch (about 50 cucumbers, 1 quart vinegar, 1/4 tsp alum, 1/2 oz each spice, 6 tbsp brown sugar) is a manageable size.
- "Little cucumber"Pickling cucumbers of 2 to 3 inches, unwaxed and freshly picked. Supermarket slicing cucumbers are waxed and too watery; if that is all you have, they will not hold texture.
- A pint of saltMeasured by volume; a pint of fine salt weighs about 1 lb 4 oz, coarse salt appreciably less. Use pickling or kosher salt: iodized table salt can darken the brine and anti-caking agents can cloud it.
- Vinegar strengthAssume 5 percent acidity cider or white vinegar, which is what modern bottles are. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute homemade vinegar of unknown strength.
- The alumAlum was the standard crisping agent of the period and food-grade potassium alum is still sold, though it leaves a faint astringency. Current practice gets the same result with calcium chloride pickle crisp, or by tucking a grape, oak or black tea leaf into each jar for its tannin.
- Whole spicesTwo ounces of peppercorns is about 1/2 cup and two ounces of mustard seed about 1/3 cup for the full batch. Tying them in a muslin bag while the vinegar boils keeps the finished jars clear, though loose spice in the jar looks handsome.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing step, and names no vessel; a crock or jar in a cold place is the likely assumption. Fill clean jars, cover with the boiling spiced vinegar, cool and refrigerate; they keep well and improve after two weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure rather than this text.
Small whole cucumbers in a spiced vinegar were a workhorse pickle of the nineteenth-century American pantry, and such books often give several versions side by side, distinguished mainly by how they chase crispness. Alum, a double sulphate sold by druggists, was the popular answer and appears in pickle recipes throughout the 1800s and well into the twentieth century; later testing suggested it did less for texture than the cooks believed, and it has largely given way to calcium salts and tannin-bearing leaves. The overnight salt brine is doing real work here, drawing water out of the cucumbers so the vinegar can penetrate without turning them limp, and the brown sugar marks this as a mildly sweet pickle rather than the fiercely sour barrel kind. The scale, two hundred cucumbers at a sitting, is a reminder that this was seasonal preserving against a whole winter, not a weekend jar or two.