On September 9, 1794, that is, two hundred and four years ago today, Martha Ballard, midwife, housewife, gardener and health care provider, living near Augusta, Maine, “scolt” her pickles. I “scolt” pickles yesterday with my young friend Marie who came over and helped me do in several pounds of pickling cukes. That is, we stuck them in jars and dumped hot water and vinegar on them with salt added. She took most of the jars home with her because I have already put up just about all the pickles that I think we will need.
Martha Ballard never mentions in her diary a variety of pickles. There seem to be very few sorts of pickles among Mainers at that time. The dill, sweet and sour, mustard, or half sours we know now are the donation of several ethnicities to our national pantry. Period recipes from the 18th century show that some folks used what we recognize to be pickling spices—mustard
seeds, cloves, allspice, pepper, mace—in the crock or jar with the vinegar. Mrs. B. doesn’t even tip her hand enough to say whether she uses any spice at all. She may have wished to, but on frontier Maine certain spices may have been in short supply from time to time and easily forgone.
She does record that she goes to a “Mr. Burtun” for vinegar. On September 12, for example, she sends her son Cyrus off with “Some radish pods & beens to pickle to mrs Burtun” and he comes back with a gallon of vinegar. Actually quite a bit of her diary is devoted to recording neighborly exchanges of labor and goods, with a subtext that with items of value being loaned here and there, returns equal in value were expected and if that failed, things would get a little less neighborly.
I didn’t keep track of the cucumbers I gave to Marie or the quantity of vinegar we used. She brought her own jars, and I was happy to find a good home for the cukes. We put grape leaves in the jars with the cucumbers and the leaves came from my friend Kristina who brought them together with some wild green gage plums which I exchanged with her for cucumbers and garlic. Have I lost you yet? Marie and her partner who is my nephew are very good eggs about pitching in around here when there is something that needs to be done (putting up or taking down storm windows, for instance, or moving large pieces of furniture, feeding the cat when we go away) so if she wants to come over and scald pickles with me, she is welcome any day.
Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were
