vicente on 2 Dec 2004  •  Link

pickled cucumber: one of the most common salt cured vegatables along with cabbage [Pickles and Sauerkraut.} other items would be added for taste like horseradish, dill, leaves of blackcurrent, layered and covered in brine boiled. But at first the cucumbers must be soaked for 12-15 hrs in ice water. Gleaned from 'Salt' by Mark Kurlansky page P. 175, a most fascinating book on the subject.

michael j. gresk m.a. on 2 Dec 2004  •  Link

"gerkhin" -- a foreshadowing perhaps of the latest addition to the london skyline??? the gerkhin is still noteworthy 340 years later....

Pauline on 10 Feb 2006  •  Link

Girkin, dantzicke dirkin (Du, uerkkijn): ii.225 small pickled cucumber: OED P. The word is Slavonic in origin.

L&M Large Glossary

in Aqua Scripto on 10 Feb 2006  •  Link

"The most common salt-cured vegetables from Alsace to the Urals were cucumbers and cabbage- pickles and sauerkraut. ...." p 175 'Salt' by Mark Kurlansky, who then tells of methods of pickling, the well and truly pickled must not be allowed fresh air, that be the rotten way way to do things.
Salted Cucumbers Solenye Ogurtsy.
A problem with pickling be the leaching of the of copper from the copper pots, and some people have an allergic reaction to Copper, known as a stomach upset.
Badly sealed pickled veggies have a habit of exploding at an untimely bewitching hour of 4 am, it be even worse when it be during a bombing raid and they go off splattering the room with their rotting contents due to a bad set of rubber seals. The stench and they being juicy RED tomatoes, the walls looked like that they had been bathed in blud, so that with odor and blood everywhere one was looking for bone matter,then only then realising that only the room be pickled pink.

Bill on 24 Oct 2014  •  Link

GHERKINS, a Sort of foreign pickled Cucumbers
---An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. N. Bailey, 1675.