Recreating the Recipe
I decided to recreate this recipe because I was curious about the ‘X’ that had been used to mark it by the annotator. The other recipes that have been annotated in the same book have much more detailed annotations, so I was curious to see if the ‘X’ perhaps indicated that the annotator had tried the recipe and didn’t like it or if they had used the ‘X’ to signify that they liked the recipe as is.
My initial reaction to reading the recipe was that I was slightly skeptical about the twenty-four hour brining process. I wondered if the brine would make the pickles way too salty. I was also unsure about the process of placing the pickles in cold vinegar for roughly five weeks and then replacing that vinegar with hot vinegar. I wasn’t sure what that method of cold to hot would actually do for the pickles.
Thankfully, there weren’t too many changes that I needed to make to this recipe given that my kitchen is definitely not a nineteenth-century kitchen. Because the recipe involves very little heating up, I was able to follow it pretty closely. In the video I record nearly the entire process except for removing the initial cold vinegar from the jar and adding the sugar at the end because the crowdedness of the jar made that process rather messy.
Pickles in the nineteenth-century would have been an incredibly useful staple for any cook. The first electric refrigerator wasn’t invented until 1913 and until then, although there had been many attempts to commercialize different types of fridges, they didn’t really achieve commercial success in the same way until the electric refrigerator was invented. For this reason, many of the cookbooks available in our archive feature recipes for preserves, pickles, jams, and other shelf-stable foods that could be made in large quantities and be kept for a year or more.
The cookbook this recipe comes from is a community cookbook, compiled and written for charity. There’s no way to know for sure since the annotator didn’t mark the cookbook with any personal information, but it stands to reason that the annotator may have known the recipe writer personally--perhaps as members of the same church or other local social groups.
Tasting the pickles, they are definitely very sour. However, they're also very crunchy which may be in part due to the salt brine. Although they're very sour on their own they would taste absolutely delicious on a sandwich or even fried. Overall, I would definitely make this recipe again just as it is written. With this exhibit, I'm adding my own 'X' to the recipe. Mrs. Drown definitely knew how to make a good pickle.
