Home › Pickles › Pickled Onions
Pickled Onions
One quart white small peeled onions, one teacupful of salt in three pints of warm water for brine. Let onions stand in brine over night. In the morning drain well. Take one quart of white wine vinegar and boil well with one green pepper and pour over the onions. The next day take the onions out; boil vinegar again and pour over them and seal. A little white sugar may be added to the boiling vinegar.
A straightforward two-stage vinegar pickle: an overnight salt brine to draw water out of the onions, then two hot vinegar pours. The only real decisions are how strong to make the brine and how you intend to store the finished jars.
- Teacupful of saltA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the measure was never standard; that is roughly 7 to 8 ounces by weight of salt in three pints of warm water — a strong brine, though well short of saturation. Use pickling or kosher salt; the additives in iodized table salt can cloud the liquid and dull the color.
- A quart of small onionsAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of pearl or silverskin onions. Pour boiling water over them for 30 seconds before peeling and the skins slip off without gouging the flesh.
- White wine vinegarAny commercial white wine vinegar today is 5–7% acetic acid, which is what makes this pickle keep. Do not dilute it or substitute a homemade or "salad" vinegar of unknown strength.
- The green pepperIn American pickle recipes of this period 'green pepper' generally means a green bell pepper, used for flavor and color rather than heat. One split green chile would give you a hot pickle instead — a possible reading, but a different dish.
- Why the vinegar is boiled twiceThe onions give up water into the first pour, diluting it; the second boiling and pour reheats the jar and gives the vinegar another day to penetrate. It does not truly restore the acid strength — boiling carries off some acetic acid with the water — but skipping it leaves a weaker liquid than the recipe intends.
- Keep them crispHeat is what turns pickled onions soft. Pour the boiling vinegar over raw onions in the jar and do not simmer the onions themselves at any point.
- Sealing and storage"Seal" here means a hot pour into a hot jar with no processing time given. Treat these as refrigerator pickles, or follow a current water-bath canning procedure with a measured processing time if you want them shelf-stable.
- Sugar and restingThe optional 'little white sugar' might reasonably be taken as a tablespoon or two per quart of vinegar — enough to round the sharpness, not to sweeten. A couple of weeks' rest before opening is the usual advice; straight from the second pour they taste raw.
Pickled onions came to American cookbooks from English practice, where small silverskin onions in vinegar were a standard accompaniment to cold meat, cheese and bread. The insistence on white onions and white wine vinegar is presumably about appearance: cider and especially malt vinegar darken the onions. Books of this period devote whole chapters to pickles because a household still expected to put up its own relishes in late summer, and vinegar was a cheap and forgiving preservative. The two-pour method addresses a problem the author never states outright: the vegetables give up water into the vinegar as they stand.