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Peach Mangoes
Take unpared, fine, large peaches (free-stones); with a knife extract the stone from the side, place in jar, pour over them boiling water salted to taste, let stand twenty-four hours; drop into fresh cold water and allow to remain ten or fifteen minutes; wipe very dry, fill each cavity with grated horse-radish and white mustardseed (prepared as directed in recipe for "Chopped Pickles), a small piece of ginger-root, and one or two cloves; sew up, and place in a stone jar as close together as possible. Make a syrup in proportion of one pint sugar to three pints vinegar; pour, boiling hot, over them. They will be ready for use in a week, and are very fine.
A stuffed pickle rather than a preserve: whole peaches are brined, hollowed, packed with pungent aromatics, sewn shut and steeped in a sweet-sour vinegar. The work is in the handling, and the peaches must be firm enough to survive it.
- Choose the fruit for firmness, not flavorFreestone peaches let you work the pit out through a side slit without wrecking the fruit, which is the whole point of the instruction. Use fruit that is ripe in color but still hard; anything soft enough to eat out of hand will collapse during the brining and stuffing.
- "Salted to taste" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no proportion for the 24-hour brine, and none can be inferred from the recipe; period brines of this kind varied widely in strength. The short soak in fresh cold water that follows may serve to draw some of the salt back out.
- White mustard seedThis is the pale yellow seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed, milder than brown or black. The recipe sends the reader to "Chopped Pickles" for how the seed and horseradish are to be readied; that treatment is not stated here.
- Grated horseradishFresh root, grated at the last minute -- its heat is volatile and fades within an hour of grating. Jarred prepared horseradish is packed in vinegar and salt and will behave differently in the syrup.
- Sewing upPlain unwaxed cotton thread and a large needle; two or three stitches across the slit is enough. Snip and pull the thread before serving. Cooks who dislike sewing can tie each peach with a loop of kitchen twine instead.
- The vinegar mattersOne pint sugar to three pints vinegar is a strongly acid syrup, which is what preserves the fruit. Use standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar, and check the label, since diluted drinking vinegars are weaker and will not do the same job.
- VesselA "stone jar" is a glazed stoneware crock. Glass canning jars work as well and let you see the level; the fruit must stay submerged in syrup throughout.
- StorageThis is an unsealed, unprocessed pickle. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and eat it within a few weeks rather than leaving a crock in a warm kitchen, and discard the batch if the syrup goes cloudy or ropy.
- YieldThe original gives only a proportion, not a quantity: make up syrup at one pint sugar to three pints vinegar, in whatever volume is needed to cover the fruit packed tight in the jar.
In nineteenth-century American cookbooks "mango" had become a verb as much as a fruit: to mango something was to hollow it, stuff it with mustard, horseradish, garlic and spice, and pickle it, in imitation of the spiced Indian mango pickles that reached English tables through the East India trade. Since fresh mangoes were unobtainable in the Ohio out of which Buckeye Cookery came (the book began as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, Marysville, Ohio, 1876, and was reissued from 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping), cooks mangoed what they had -- most often small muskmelons, sometimes green bell peppers, which is why peppers are still called mangoes in parts of the Midwest and Ohio Valley today. Peaches were a natural third candidate, and the recipe belongs to the same household logic as the rest of the pickle chapter: a quantity of fruit ripening all at once, and vinegar and sugar as the means of stretching it into winter.