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Cucumber Pickles (Put fifty little cucumbers)
Put fifty little cucumbers in a jar, put on them a pint Let. of salt. Then pour over them boiling water to cover. stand over night; drain them, put them in layers in a jar, every other layer grape leaves, and little garden peppers and mustard seed. Then have the vinegar boiling and pour over.
Put a little alum finely powdered in the vinegar (one-half teaspoonful of the alum). Use good wine or cider vinegar. You can measure the water and know the quantity of vinegar needed.
This is a fresh-pack pickle put up in an open jar with no measured acidity and no processing, and the instructions as written cannot be followed safely. The notes below explain the terms and the specific failures.
- The vinegar quantity is undefinedThe closing line — "you can measure the water and know the quantity of vinegar needed" — tells the cook to match the vinegar to the volume of the soaking water, with no statement of strength or dilution. Safe pickling depends on the finished brine reaching a known acidity, and nothing here establishes one.
- No processing and no sealBoiling vinegar poured over drained cucumbers in an open jar does not sterilise the contents or produce a vacuum seal. The recipe gives no storage instruction at all; as written it leaves an unsealed, unrefrigerated jar of vegetables at unknown acidity, the setting in which Clostridium botulinum is a risk.
- AlumPotassium alum was a common crisping agent in nineteenth-century pickle recipes. It is no longer recommended: it contributes nothing to safety, can cause digestive upset in quantity, and modern practice omits it in favour of tannin, cold soaking and correct processing.
- The salt brine is a holding step, not a cureA pint of salt over fifty cucumbers with boiling water, left overnight, draws out water and firms the flesh. It is not a cure and does not preserve anything on its own — the keeping quality was meant to come from the vinegar, which is the part left unspecified.
- Grape leavesThe layers of grape leaves are there for tannin, which inhibits the enzymes that soften a pickle. This part is sound and is still used; the leaf must be fresh and unsprayed. It has no preservative effect.
- "Little garden peppers"Small hot peppers of whatever the kitchen garden grew, dried or fresh; the recipe names no variety. Any small hot chile serves, and the quantity is left to the cook.
- ScaleFifty small pickling cucumbers is very roughly 4 to 8 lb depending on size, a crock-sized batch. A pint of salt is about 2 cups.
- If you want cucumber picklesUse a current tested recipe with stated vinegar strength, jar size and processing time.
Pickle chapters in American household books of this period run to many entries because a cellar of crocks was how a family got vegetables between the last of the garden and the first of the spring greens. The technique here — salt overnight, drain, layer with aromatics, scald with vinegar — is the standard "quick" or fresh-pack method, as opposed to the long salt-brine fermentation used for full sour pickles. Grape leaves and alum both appear for the same reason, crispness: the tannin in the leaf slows the softening enzymes concentrated at the cucumber's blossom end, an effect cooks worked with empirically long before it was explained, while alum was cheaply available from grocers and druggists. The vagueness about vinegar quantity is characteristic rather than careless: vinegar was often homemade or drawn from a barrel at unknown strength, and the notion of a measured, verified acidity in the finished jar belongs to later food-science work.