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Sweet Pickle of Stuffed Cucumbers
Select the large yellow cucumbers, when perfectly sound and fresh. Pare and cut off a piece about an inch in length at one end. Remove all the seeds and soft pulp and fasten each end securely with a thread to the cucumber to which it belongs. Then lay them in a salt brine forty-eight hours, allowing one tablespoonful of salt to each quart of water, changing the water after the first twentyfour hours. Next lay in clear water for twenty-four hours, changing it frequently so all the salt will be extracted. This process is for the purpose of hardening them. Make a filling of raisins, figs and citron, in the proportion of one pound of raisins, one-half pound of figs, one-quarter of a pound of citron. Seed the raisins, cut all fine, add one teaspoonful of ground cinnamon and mix well. Fill the cucumbers with this mixture and sew each end tightly to the cucumber from which it was taken. Make a syrup of two pounds of granulated sugar to one pint of vinegar of medium strength and to which add (tied in a cloth) onehalf of an ounce of whole cinnamon, one-half teaspoonful of nutmeg, one-half a teaspoonful of whole cloves. Add the cucumbers and boil until they are tender and clear, about one hour. When done, bottle and seal immediately.
This is a stuffed sweet pickle from the era of open-kettle canning, and the preserving method it relies on has since been abandoned. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- Open-kettle sealing"Bottle and seal immediately" means filling hot jars and trusting the cooling lid to draw a seal, with no processing in a boiling-water bath afterwards. Contamination on the jar rim, the lid and the outside of the food is not addressed, and a vacuum formed this way is unreliable. No current preserving authority accepts the method for any product.
- Undefined acidity"Vinegar of medium strength" gives no fixed figure. Household vinegars of the period varied in strength, and safe pickling depends on a known acid concentration; nothing here lets you calculate the finished pH.
- The stuffing dilutes the acidEach cucumber is a sealed parcel of raisins, figs and citron, sewn shut. The syrup surrounds it but penetrates the dense fruit mass slowly and unevenly, so the interior of a stuffed cucumber can remain well above the pH at which Clostridium botulinum is inhibited even after the outside tastes sharp. A low-acid centre in a sealed jar is the classic botulism setup.
- The brine is not a cureOne tablespoon of salt to a quart of water is roughly 2 percent, far too weak to preserve anything. The recipe is honest that its purpose is firming the flesh, not safety, but it does mean the cucumbers stand for three days -- forty-eight hours in weak brine and a further twenty-four in plain water -- in conditions that favour spoilage organisms before they ever meet vinegar.
- An hour of boiling proves nothingBoiling the filled cucumbers in syrup will make them tender and translucent, but heat applied before sealing does not sterilise the jar or protect the contents afterwards. Botulinum spores survive boiling; only acidity or pressure canning controls them in a sealed container.
- Terms in the ingredient listCitron here is candied citron peel, the pale green-yellow confection sold for fruitcake, not the citron melon and not lemon. "Large yellow cucumbers" are overgrown field cucumbers past the green stage, the same type used for old-fashioned mangoes and stuffed pickles; the nearest modern equivalent is a large, sound slicing cucumber, seeds scooped out.
- If you want the dishUse a tested modern sweet-pickle recipe with a specified vinegar acidity and a boiling-water-bath schedule rather than this one.
Stuffed cucumber pickles belong to a family of Victorian and Edwardian sweetmeats that blurred the line between condiment and dessert — cucumber and melon rind boiled in heavy sugar syrup with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, served alongside cold meat at supper. The technique of hollowing an overgrown cucumber and stuffing it descends from the older English "mango", so called because eighteenth-century cooks pickled cucumbers and small melons in imitation of the imported Indian mango pickles they could not easily obtain; the name clung to the vessel-like stuffed cucumber long after anyone remembered why. The filling of raisins, figs and candied citron is a fruitcake mixture, and its appearance here says a good deal about the late-nineteenth-century American larder, where cheap refined sugar and shipped dried fruit made this kind of extravagance possible in an ordinary household. Books of the period grouped such recipes under "sweet and spiced pickles," a chapter that shared the assumptions of both the plain cucumber pickles and the preserves.