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Cucumbers in Oil
Pare and slice three dozen medium-sized cucumbers, sprinkle them with salt and allow them to remain over night. In the morning drain and put them in a stone jar and pour over them a dressing made of one cupful of olive oil and one-half cupful of white mustard seed, a tablespoonful of celery seed, one tablespoonful of pepper corns and one quart of cold cider vinegar.
A cold-pack pickle: no cooking, no sealing, just salt, oil, vinegar and whole spices. The overnight salting is what makes it work, and the storage is where it needs modern judgement.
- The hinge: salt overnight, then drain hardSalting draws out the water that would otherwise dilute the vinegar and leave the slices limp. Drain thoroughly in a colander and press gently before dressing; do not rinse away all the salt, and do not skip the wait.
- QuantitiesThree dozen medium cucumbers is roughly 10-12 lb, filling a gallon jar or more. For a household batch, quarter everything: 9 cucumbers, 1/4 cup olive oil, 2 tbsp mustard seed, 3/4 tsp celery seed, 3/4 tsp peppercorns, 1 cup vinegar.
- White mustard seedThis is the pale yellow seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed, milder than the brown. Use it whole; it swells and softens in the brine.
- Cider vinegar strengthModern bottled cider vinegar is generally standardised at around 5% acidity; home-made or farmhouse vinegar of the period varied in strength. Do not substitute a low-acid or diluted "drinking" vinegar here, since the vinegar is doing all the preserving.
- The stone jarPeriod crockery was sometimes lead-glazed, which is a poor choice for anything this acidic. Use glass or food-grade stoneware, and keep the slices submerged under the liquid.
- StorageThis is not a canned pickle: nothing is heat-processed or sealed. Keep it refrigerated and eat within a month or so, rather than leaving the crock in a pantry as the original assumes.
- The oil layerOlive oil will not emulsify into vinegar and will float and congeal in the cold. Bring the jar to room temperature and stir or shake before serving so each slice picks up some oil.
- When to start eatingGive it two or three days for the mustard and celery seed to bloom. Serve as a cold relish with cold meat, sandwiches or a plate of cheese.
Oil pickles were a small but distinct branch of the American pickle repertoire in this period, and they read as more Continental than the sugar-and-spice sweet pickles more commonly met with. The technique is the simplest kind of preservation: salt to draw water, vinegar to acidify, whole spices for flavour, with a film of oil on top that dressed the cucumbers and may also have helped exclude air from the crock. That olive oil appears at all is worth noting; in a general household cookbook of this period it was still a comparatively expensive imported item, and its presence here marks the recipe as slightly cosmopolitan. The stone jar, by contrast, is entirely ordinary: crocks were the standard vessel for pickles and salted meats in kitchens that expected a cool cellar rather than refrigeration.