Bread and butter pickles without mustard seed

Pickle recipes meant for longer-term storage will include instructions for sealing the jars. While some recipes may have you use hot jars and hot brine that will result in a fairly reliable seal ratio (meaning most of the jars will properly seal), other recipes will have you put the filled and closed jars in a boiling water bath to be processed for a specific amount of time. I've found this method to yield an even higher ratio of properly sealed jars.

In either scenario, the sign of a sealed jar (assuming you are using canning jars with a lid and ring system) is an indented dome on the lid. Jars that do not seal properly will still have a protruding dome.

Most recipes will have all the specific information you need to make pickles including the shelf life of sealed jars. The Ball canning jar company has a good website: http://www.freshpreserving.com/recipes.aspx

Best of luck - I hope your pickles are a tasty success!

I have seen recipes that call for chopped white onions instead of pearl onions, which leads me to believe it is feasible.

The texture might be different; when cooked, pearl onions tend to have a different sort of bite to them, much like a grape, revealing a burst of flavor after a slight resistance, whereas chopped fullsize onions tend to be more one-note and soft. I don't know for sure what pickling does to the texture, but if it is beneficial to use whole onions for a similar effect, you'll lose that. I suspect the flavor penetration would be greater, however, due to the cutting.