Home › Preserving › Stuffed Pickled Peppers
Stuffed Pickled Peppers
Page 142. leaving a half inch of the pepper to hold the top in place, cut in the scoring. Take out and discard the seeds and veins. Make a brine of salt and water strong enough to float an egg. Let the peppers stand twentyfour hours in this brine. Drain and fill with chopped cabbage, green tomatoes, onions, and peppers, either one alone or all combined, in such proportion as is preferable. Season the chopped vegetables with mustard seed, grated horseradish, whole cloves, cinnamon bark, and nasturtium seeds. Prepare the vegetables in the same manner as in making piccalilli. Use to fill the peppers. When filled, sew the tops of the peppers in place with white thread. Pack the peppers in a stone jar, and cover with cider vinegar, scalding hot. Let stand over night; drain off the vinegar, scald, and return to the peppers. Drain off the vinegar, and scald several succeeding mornings. Then cover with fresh vinegar, made scalding hot, and set the pickles aside. A pint of sugar may be added to each gallon of vinegar. The time of preparation may be shortened by cooking the mangoes half an hour in the hot vinegar. Then drain, cover with a fresh supply and set aside.
The text begins mid-sentence — the missing opening tells you to cut a lid in the top of each sweet pepper, hinged by half an inch of flesh. Everything else is a straightforward crock pickle, but two things in it are no longer standard practice: the open-jar storage and the vagueness about vinegar strength.
- "Mangoes" means these peppersThe last lines of the recipe use mangoes as a synonym for the stuffed peppers themselves. In American cookery of this period any hollowed, stuffed, pickled vegetable was a mango; no tropical fruit is involved.
- Brine strong enough to float an eggThat is roughly a 10 percent salt solution; mix salt into the water until a fresh egg floats rather than working to a fixed measure. Use plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt clouds the brine and can darken the vegetables.
- Vinegar strength is the hingeThe recipe says only "cider vinegar" and never dilutes it; use a commercial cider vinegar of 5 percent acidity. Do not substitute a homemade, raw, or "reduced acidity" vinegar, and do not add water — the acid is what preserves a jar of low-acid cabbage, onion and green tomato.
- Storage, brought up to dateA stone jar of vinegar pickles left in a cool cellar was normal when this was written. Current practice is to pack the finished peppers into clean canning jars, cover with the boiling vinegar, and either process in a boiling-water bath or keep them refrigerated. An unsealed crock at room temperature is the one part of this method to leave behind.
- The morning scaldingsDraining, reboiling and returning the vinegar for several days was a way of driving acid into dense vegetables and killing off surface spoilage without a canner. The shortcut given at the end — half an hour's simmer in hot vinegar, then fresh vinegar — does the same work in one session and is the version worth following.
- SugarA pint of sugar to a gallon of vinegar is about 2 tablespoons per cup — a sweet-sour pickle, not a sweet one. It is optional and does not affect keeping quality at this level.
- Nasturtium seeds and horseradishGreen nasturtium seed pods were the standard American stand-in for capers; pickled capers work if you have no nasturtiums. Grated fresh horseradish loses its heat quickly once cut, so grate it directly into the filling.
- ThreadSew the lids with plain cotton string or unwaxed cotton thread. Modern polyester sewing thread survives the hot vinegar but is unpleasant to find in a pickle; cotton is easier to cut away at the table.
- YieldThe original gives none. Figure one stuffed pepper per person as a relish, and chop the filling generously; you will need roughly a cupful per pepper.
The odd word in this recipe is mangoes, which in American English long meant a stuffed pickle rather than a fruit. Pickled mangoes came to England from India in the seventeenth century and were prized; since the fruit itself could not be had in New England, cooks reproduced the idea with what they had — small muskmelons first, later sweet peppers — hollowed, packed with spiced chopped vegetables, sewn shut and steeped in vinegar. By the time this book was written, "mango" for a stuffed pickled pepper was ordinary kitchen vocabulary in much of the United States. The recipe also shows its place in the book by cross-reference: the vegetables are to be prepared "in the same manner as in making piccalilli," and the page carries a caption pointing to the mixed mustard pickle materials on page 137.