To pickle CUCUMBERS fliced

To pickle CUCUMBERS fliced

Pare thirty large cucumbers, flice them to a pewter difh, take fix onions, flice and row on them fome falt, fo cover them and then ftand to drain twenty four hours; take your pickle of white wine vinegar, nutmeg, pepper, cloves and mace, boil the spices in the pickle, drain the liquor clean from the cucumbers, put them into a deep pot, pour the liquor upon them boiling hot, and cover them very clofe; when they are cold drain the liquor from them, give it another boil, and when it is cold, pour it on them again; fo keep them for ufe.

Moxon, Elizabeth, English Housewifery Exemplified, 1764

 Thanks to the unexpected bounty of 20 pounds of organic-practice-grown cucumbers from a fellow homeschooling mom, I had the opportunity to make pickles, as well as use cucumbers for snacks and sandwiches.

The first batch I made was a childhood favorite: Bread and Butter pickles, which I made using a recipe from Ball’s Blue Book Guide of Preserving. The second batch was Kosher Dills from the Rodale Garden Book Preserving Summer’s Bounty.

But the third batch?

I wanted to do something completely different.

A fan of period cookbooks, one of my favorite finds was Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifery Exemplified which was first published in 1764. The recipes are simple well written, so I thought I would try one. The above recipe seemed to fit the bill. However, there were a few details missing: exact amounts.

 Vinegar only is used, but how much vinegar is not specified. Nor is the amount of the spices. The only fixed amounts are those for the onions and cucumbers. Looking at other recipes, especially that for Bread and Butter which included sliced cucumbers, there were similarities, such as a certain amount of spices per jar. Since I didn’t have a deep pot in which to store the cucumbers, I decided to use the method of cold pack pickles, and since I used only vinegar, I would only have to process them for ten minutes in a boiling-water bath.

The logistics were challenging, as I had only two large burners on which to both boil the vinegar and boil the water to sterilize the jars, as well as a spice cabinet that could have been better organized and better stocked (on the ever-growing to-do list).

Four to six weeks to wait…

I look forward to tasting the results!