Pickling cucumbers come in a range of varieties, all short and a little stubby, with bumpy skins and the most appealing crisp flesh. You can find them in some markets year round, but it’s only in summer that the texture is just right — with a little snap when you bite into one — and especially good if you get them directly from the grower at a farmers’ market or farm stand.
My mother sliced the cucumbers that my father grew in his huge garden and turned them into Refrigerator Bread and Butter Pickles. It’s probably the easiest pickle recipe you’ll ever find. Many women my mother knew made them, and each year they compared notes.
Pickling vegetables (though technically cucumbers are fruits), putting up summer produce, tucking a few things into the freezer for a cold winter day, is an appealing and satisfying activity and very gratifying. Our grandmothers did it out of necessity. In their day, a New Englander’s respite from a steady diet of root vegetables might consist of a few jars of one’s own homemade tomato sauce or corn relish.
Every summer I get the idea that I’m going to put up a bunch of things. But then summer comes and there’s so much else to do. I end up making a single large batch of one thing.
For years, I pickled green beans with masses of fresh dill, then for a couple of years I roasted tomatoes for sauce, lemon curd (a year-round activity) was next, followed by the easiest job of all: Tucking whole ripe summer tomatoes into zipper bags and freezing them to pull out months later.
Many pickle recipes call for submerging the jars in a big pot of boiling water. If everything is sterile and you use proper canning jars, this seals the jars so you can keep them in a cool spot in the pantry for many months, like the jars of pickles you buy at the supermarket.
But that’s not what we’re doing here. This recipe must be kept in the fridge because you haven’t sealed the lids as if you’re canning. You’ve just screwed on the lids.
For her cucumber pickles, my mother used short pickling cukes or larger, longer “slicing cucumbers” as they’re called. She had one of the oldest, simplest mandolines, the hand-held slicers used by chefs. Hers was a Feemster’s Famous Vegetable Slicer, little more than a carbon steel blade set on a primitive stand, which now comes with a safety guard. It did the job.
The cucumber slices went into a brine made with equal parts distilled white vinegar and sugar (much too much sugar for today’s tastes). She’d pop in a little turmeric, dry mustard, and salt, along with thin strips of red bell pepper and sliced onions.
Don’t let the pickling brine boil, though other cooks might tell you to. Boiling makes the cucumbers lose their snap.
They’re ladled into canning jars — in my mother’s case, that meant any old jars she had around, and I follow that pattern — then the lids are added, they’re left to cool, and refrigerated for up to a month.
My mother, never one to pay a bit of attention to sell-by dates — she learned this during the Great Depression — would serve August’s refrigerator pickles on the Thanksgiving table, which, if my math is correct, means she kept them for 16 weeks. I guess we all had herd immunity to her pickles.
When I make those pickles, I use much less sugar and only stubby pickling cukes, because I like smaller rounds. You have to keep turning them in the pot until all the slices are coated with liquid and starting to turn golden. Never let a wooden spoon or rubber spatula near the pot because the turmeric will turn the utensil yellow.
Ball jars are available at hardware stores and supermarkets this time of year. I prefer pint-size. If I want to give a jar away, I’m not parting with a whole quart.
Prettier and far more expensive are Le Parfait jars, which come with a rubber ring and a clamp on the side of the jar to seal the top. You don’t need that for refrigerator pickles. Their screw-top jars are fine here.
My batch this year made 4 pints. One pint went into a single Le Parfait jar I found in my glass collection that must have come from homemade jam someone gave me. For the rest, I made use of a pudgy French mustard jar and another jar from artichokes in brine that I bought for a recipe test. You get the idea. Catch-as-catch-can.
Last summer at a barn dinner at Bliss Farm in Chester, Vt., some of the walls were lined with canning jars of pickled green beans and tomato sauce. In the barn, in the waning light of a warm summer night, those jars looked magnificent.
What I’m missing for my pickles is matching jars, a barn, a shelf in the barn to line up the jars, and the gloaming hour. Otherwise, mine too are magnificent.
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com.