When walnuts are so ripe that a pin will go into them easily, they are ready for pickling.  They should be soaked twelve days in very strong cold salt and water, which has been boiled and skimmed.  A quantity of vinegar, enough to cover them well, should be boiled with whole pepper, mustard-seed, small onions, or garlic, cloves, ginger, and horseradish; this should not be poured upon them till it is cold.  They should be pickled a few months before they are eaten.  To be kept close covered; for the air softens them.  The liquor is an excellent catsup to be eaten on fish.

Put peppers into strong salt and water, until they become yellow; then turn them green by keeping them in warm salt and water, shifting them every two days.  Then drain them, and pour scalding vinegar over them.  A bag of mustard-seed is an improvement.  If there is mother in vinegar, scald and strain it.

Cucumbers should be in weak brine three or four days after they are picked; then they should be put in a tin or wooden pail of clean water, and kept slightly warm in the kitchen corner for two or three days.  Then take as much vinegar as you think your pickle jar will hold; scald it with pepper, allspice, mustard-seed, flag-root, horseradish, &c., if you happen to have them; half of them will spice the pickles very well.  Throw in a bit of alum as big as a walnut; this serves to make pickles hard.  Skim the vinegar clean, and pour it scalding hot upon the cucumbers.  Brass vessels are not healthy for preparing anything acid.  Red cabbages need no other pickling than scalding, spiced vinegar poured upon them, and suffered to remain eight or ten days before you eat them.  Some people think it improves them to keep them in salt and water twenty-four hours before they are pickled.

If you find your pickles soft and insipid, it is owing to the weakness of the vinegar.  Throw away the vinegar, (or keep it to clean your brass kettles,) then cover your pickles with strong, scalding vinegar, into which a little allspice, ginger, horseradish and alum have been thrown.  By no means omit a pretty large bit of alum.  Pickles attended to in this way, will keep for years, and be better and better every year.

Some people prefer pickled nasturtion-seed to capers.  They should be kept several days after they are gathered, and then covered with boiling vinegar, and bottled when cold.  They are not fit to be eaten for some months.

Martinoes are prepared in nearly the same way as other pickles.  The salt and water in which they are put, two or three days previous to pickling, should be changed every day; because martinoes are very apt to become soft.  No spice should be used but allspice, cloves, and cinnamon.  The martinoes and the spice should be scalded in the vinegar, instead of pouring the vinegar over the martinoes.

BEER.