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Pin Money Mangoes
Cut out a small cube from one end of each mango. The cube should be about one third an inch in diameter. With a skewer remove the soft center, through this opening. Cover the mangoes with salted water (usual proportions), and let stand over night, then drain. If the fruit is firm, let cook in boiling water until tender. Take, for each ten mangoes, one of the prepared mangoes; chop fine, add half the bulk, each, of cleaned dried currants, mixed white mustard, and celery seeds. Before using the seeds, let them stand in boiling water to cover fifteen minutes, then drain and mix with the currants and use to fill the mangoes. Put the cubes back in place, then run through each a piece of wooden toothpick to hold it in place. Pack the mangoes in a porcelain saucepan; make a syrup, using one pint of sugar to each three pints of vinegar, and pour this, boiling hot, over the mangoes. Let stand until next day. Then drain off the syrup, reheat, and pour it over the mangoes. Repeat this process three or four days. Then let the whole come to the boiling point and store in jars, as canned fruit. When storing the mangoes in the jars, add half a dozen or more small red peppers to each jar.
Vinegar and water, half and half, may be used for cooking the mangoes.
A "mango" here is not the tropical fruit. In American kitchens of this period the word meant any small hollowed vegetable or melon stuffed and pickled, and the recipe assumes you already know which one you are holding.
- What a mango isMost often a mango melon (a small hard muskmelon, Cucumis melo var. chito), sometimes a green bell pepper or a small cucumber. Any firm, hollow-centred fruit of about fist size behaves the same way; peppers need no pre-cooking, melons do.
- The cube"About one third an inch in diameter" describes a plug of roughly that width cut from one end of the fruit, not a slit. Cut it cleanly with a paring knife and keep each plug with its own fruit, since they will not fit interchangeably.
- Salted water, usual proportionsThe recipe leaves the figure to the reader; a common pickling brine of the period runs to roughly 1 cup of salt to 1 gallon of water. Use non-iodised salt; iodine and anti-caking agents cloud the liquid.
- Mixed white mustard and celery seedsWhite mustard seed is the pale yellow seed sold today simply as yellow mustard seed. The wording is ambiguous, but "mixed" most likely refers to the two seeds being mixed together rather than to prepared mustard. The fifteen-minute stand in boiling water presumably softens them so they do not stay gritty in the filling.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small raisin, not fresh redcurrants. Roughly: for ten fruits, chop one stuffed-size fruit fine and add half that volume each of currants, soaked mustard seed and soaked celery seed.
- Porcelain saucepanAn enamel-lined or otherwise non-reactive pan. Bare aluminium, cast iron and copper will react with the vinegar and both discolour the pickle and pick up a metallic taste; stainless steel is fine.
- The hinge: repeated draining and reheatingPouring off the syrup, boiling it and returning it over three or four days is what keeps the fruit whole. The usual explanation is that each cycle raises the sugar concentration a little at a time, so the flesh takes it up instead of collapsing or shrivelling as it would in one long boil.
- ToothpicksPlain round wooden toothpicks, not the coloured or mint-flavoured kind. Push one through the plug and into the flesh on both sides; remove before serving.
- SealingThis is open-kettle canning, standard in 1915 and no longer recommended even for a vinegar pickle at this strength: the jars are sealed on trapped heat alone and seals fail unpredictably. Follow a current tested pickle process for filling and water-bath timing, and treat any jar with a soft lid, cloudy brine or off smell as spoiled.
- Yield and keepingTen stuffed fruits will fill something like three or four pint jars. The peppers make it hot; six per jar is assertive.
"Pin money" was the small independent income a woman might earn on her own account, and preserving for sale was one way of earning it; a title like this one suggests a product meant to be sold or given away rather than eaten at the family table, though that is inference rather than record. The dish itself records a long linguistic drift: pickled mango from India reached English tables in the seventeenth century, and "to mango" came to mean to hollow, stuff and pickle, so that a stuffed muskmelon or a stuffed green pepper was simply a mango. Janet McKenzie Hill's Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making belongs to the Boston Cooking School-influenced manuals of the period, when domestic-science writers were trying to put measured proportions and repeatable method behind what had been an oral, seasonal craft, and the surviving vagueness here, "usual proportions," a saucepan simply brought to the boiling point, shows how far that project still had to go.