Pickled Cucumbers
Perforate fresh gathered cucumbers, with a needle, or fork, put them into a stone jar, and pour over them boiling hot vinegar. Season with salt, pimento, long pepper, and ginger. These substances should be simmered with the vinegar for a few minutes.
To this pickle is sometimes intentionally given a lively green colour, by copper, and numerous fatal consequences are known to have ensued from the use of such a practice.36
If pickled cucumber, or any other kind of vegetable pickle, be wanted of a lively green colour, it may readily be effected by soaking them when ready prepared, for a few minutes, first in tincture of turmeric, and then in a diluted solution of the colouring matter of indigo, dissolved in water.37 This method of straining the pickle is perfectly harmless.
Samphire, French beans, tomatoes, capsicum pods, nasturtium and raddish pods, may be pickled in the same manner.
Notes
36 Treatise on the Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons, 1821.—“Poisonous Pickles.”
37 This substance is called, at the colour-shops, intense (not liquid blue, which is quite a different preparation of Indigo,) blue.