HFF 6.13: In a Pickle

The Challenge: In a Pickle. Try your hand at preserving food--pickles, jellies, jams, or any method you choose. Alternatively, make a dish that uses preserves as an ingredient.

The Recipe: Pickled Cucumbers from The Domestic Cookery (supplemented by modern canning methods from The Joy of Cooking):

Pickle Cucumbers a Second Way. Gather your cucumbers on a dry day, and put them into a narrow topped pitcher, put to them a head garlic, a few white mustard seeds, and a few blades of mace, half an ounce of black pepper, the same long pepper and ginger, and a good handful of salt into your vinegar; pour it upon your cucumbers boiling hot, set them by the fire, and keep them warm for three days, and boil your alegar once every day; keep them close covered till they are a good green, and then tie them down with a leather, and keep them for use.

The Date/Year and Region: 1847, London

 

How Did You Make It: With some adaptations. For safety reasons, I mostly used this recipe for the flavor profile, with modern canning methods and times. After sanitizing the jars, etc., I washed and dried the cucumbers and cut off the ends of each (and halved the ones that were a little too big to fit in the jars; then heated up the vinegar and salt; packed each jar with as many cucumbers as would fit, as well as a clove of garlic, a few black peppercorns, a long peppercorn, about a dozen mustard seeds, a small pieces of peeled ginger, and a sprinkle of powdered mace (having no source for whole blades); poured the hot vinegar into the heated and packed jars; and processed the jars in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.

 

Time to Complete: About an hour, not including all the sanitizing steps. A lot of this also involved waiting for more water to boil, so it would have been more efficient to have more jars going at the same time.

 

Total Cost: About $5 for the pickling cucumbers.

 

How Successful Was It?: Haven't tried them yet. All but one of the jars appear to have sealed properly, so I'm counting at a 4/5 successful rate so far.

 

How Accurate Is It? As mentioned above, I used modern jars, hot-packing methods, and processing times instead of letting the pickles heat for three days in a pitcher. However, I decided on the hot-pack because that seemed the closest to the method referenced in the period instructions. The recipe itself does not specify the strength of the salted vinegar, which I again filled in with a modern value: 5% white pickling vinegar, with a tablespoon of pickling salt per pint for flavor. Also, the receipt's vagueness of how many cucumbers fit into "a narrow-topped pitcher" means that the ratio of cucumbers to garlic, mustard, pepper, etc., cannot be as precise as it ought. I therefore made my best guess based on the jar sizes available to me, though I wouldn't be surprised if the spices are meant to be even more concentrated.

Yep. Pickles.