Mangoes
Select green or half grown muskmelons; remove a piece the length of the melon, an inch and a half wide in the middle and tapering to a point at each end; take out seeds with a tea-spoon, secure one end of each piece to its own melon by a stitch made with a needle and white thread. Make a brine of salt and cold water strong enough to float an egg, pour it over them, and after twentyfour hours take them out. For filling, use chopped tomatoes and chopped cabbage prepared as in "Chopped Pickles," small cucumbers, small white onions, and nasturtium pods, each prepared by remaining in salt water in separate jars twenty-four hours; add also green beans boiled in salt water until tender. For spice, use cinnamon-bark, whole cloves, chopped horse-radish, cayenne pepper, mustard seed, the latter prepared as directed in "Chopped Pickles." Prepare three or four times as much cabbage and tomatoes as of other articles, as any part left over may be placed in jar with vinegar poured over, and is ready for the table. Use one, or, if small, two cucumbers, two or three onions, and the same quantity of bean and nasturtium pods, placing them in mango first, with two or three cloves, three or four sticks of cinnamon an inch long, and half a tea-spoon horse-radish, and filling up afterward with the chopped cabbage or tomatoes (mixing, or using them separately in alternate melons) pressing down very firmly, so that the mango is filled tight, sprinkling on the cayenne pepper last. Sew in the piece all around in its proper place with strong white thread; when all are thus prepared, place in a stone crock, cover with weak cider-vinegar, let remain over night; in the morning place the mangoes, and the vinegar in which they were soaked, in a porcelain kettle, boil half an hour, place in a jar, cover with good strong eider vinegar, let stand all night; in the morning drain off vinegar and boil it, adding one pint of sugar to each gallon, and pour boiling hot over the mangoes; drain off and boil the vinegar three or four times, and they are done. This is not the usual way of preparing mangoes, but it is much the best. To pickle nasturtiums, soak as collected in salt and water for twenty-four hours, drain, and put into cold vinegar; when all the seed is thus prepared, drain, and cover with fresh boiling-hot vinegar.
A stuffed pickled melon, not a tropical fruit — this is one of the more labor-intensive things in the pickle chapter, and it depends on two other recipes in the same section. Read the notes on brine strength and vessels before starting.
- What a "mango" is hereIn nineteenth-century American usage a mango was any small vegetable hollowed out, stuffed with spiced pickle, sewn shut and cured in vinegar. The recipe calls for green or half-grown muskmelons (cantaloupe types), still hard and with soft seeds.
- Brine strong enough to float an eggA heavy brine, conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 10 percent salt; the egg-float test is approximate rather than exact. Use non-iodized salt; table salt with anti-caking agents will cloud the brine.
- The cross-referencesThe cabbage, tomatoes and mustard seed are all prepared as directed in "Chopped Pickles" elsewhere in this section, so that recipe has to be read first. If the filling is not drained of its water it will dilute the vinegar, which is doing most of the preserving here.
- Porcelain kettleMeans enameled cast iron or a similar non-reactive pot. Vinegar attacks bare aluminum, copper and unlined iron, picking up metallic flavor and gray color. Stainless steel is the modern equivalent.
- Sewing them shutUnwaxed cotton butcher's twine and a trussing needle work better than sewing thread and are far easier to cut away later. The lid piece must sit back in its own melon; the cut edges only match where they came from.
- Nasturtium podsThe green seed pods, picked just after the flowers drop, pickled as directed at the end. Brined capers are the usual substitute and go in at the same stage.
- The repeated boilingDraining, boiling and re-pouring the vinegar three or four times is the hinge of the recipe: each cycle drives vinegar further into the dense filling and acidifies it throughout, and skipping it leaves an under-acidified centre. Use vinegar of 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it beyond the initial weak-vinegar soak the recipe calls for.
- Yield and storageThe recipe fixes no number of melons; work to the size of your crock, and expect surplus chopped pickle, which the text says to jar with vinegar poured over. This is an open-crock vinegar pickle, not a tested canning procedure -- refrigerate the finished jars, keep everything submerged, and use within a few months. Slice each mango crosswise to serve, as a relish with cold meat.
The name is the interesting part. Pickled mango, shipped in casks from India through the East India trade, was a fashionable condiment in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies; American cooks who could not get the fruit imitated the effect with hollowed muskmelons, cucumbers and later sweet peppers, and the imitation kept the borrowed name. That usage stuck hard enough in the Ohio Valley and the lower Midwest that "mango" meant green bell pepper in produce markets there well into the twentieth century, which is context for a book compiled, as Buckeye Cookery was, out of Ohio housekeeping practice. The recipe closes with the remark that "this is not the usual way of preparing mangoes, but it is much the best."