The "Queen" cookery books: Pickles and Preserves

Caveached Fish. — Cut the fish into slices, fillets, or pieces, as is most convenient, sprinkle them with pepper and salt (using white pepper for delicate fish), then fry these in oil. When cooked, drain, and put them aside to cool. Boil some vinegai (sufficient to cover the fish well), with enough white peppercorns, a few cloves, a blade or so of mace, and salt to flavour the vinegar well. Allow this to become cold, then pour to it a gill of oil ; now pack the fish in a jar with very thinly sliced onion between each piece or layer of fish, and then pour the pickle over it all. Keep it well covered. Any fish can be treated in this way, salmon being particularly good, but requiring to stand for a day or two, as it breaks if put quite fresh into the pickle. Some people add a few peppercorns and bay leaves to the pickle. CHAPTER XII. In this chapter will be found odds and ends of recipes that did not appear properly to belong to any of the foregoing chapters, and are therefore gathered up here indiscriminately. Barberries, to Preserve. — Choose fine bunches of the berries, or, if needful, make up pretty groups by binding them delicately together with white filoselle or fine sewing silk, and stone them with a needle. Cover the bottom of a preserving pan three inches deep with syrup, boiled to the thread, now put in the fruit, and let it boil up again, lifting the pan off directly it boils ; let it stand for half an hour, then boil up again and lift out the fruit ; now boil the sugar again for ten minutes, and again pour it over the fruit. Let it all stand till next day, then boil up the syrup again, and strain it over the berries, after which tie down when cool, and store. Mind the syrup is well skimmed all the time, and if boiling the fruit in it should discolour it, clear it at the last boiling with the whipped white and shell of an egg. Rowan (or mountain ash) berries can be preserved in the same way. Barberries, in Brine. — Make the bunches up as before, and store them in jars in a strong salt and water brine, and tie down with a bladder ; when a scum rises replace the brine with fresh, but always keep the berries well covered. Mountain ash or rowan berries can be preserved in this way, Walnuts, to Keep. — Put a layer of very dry sea sand at the bottom of a jar, and on this a layer of nuts, then more sand and more nuts, till the jar is full, but be careful that the nuts never touch each other in any of the layers. When wanted for use lay them in warm water for an hour, shifting the water as it cools, then rub them dry, and they will peel easily and eat well. Most nuts can be kept in this way. Another way, and one much practised abroad, is to pack the nuts, which must be perfectly sound, into stoneware jars with tight-fitting lids, and when they are packed close cover down tightly, and bury them from eighteen to twenty-four inches below the ground in a cool border, or bury in sand in a corner of a dry cellar.