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Capsicums, Pickled
Capsicums may be pickled either green or red. They are finest and ripest in September and October. If they can be obtained from the garden it is best to gather the pods with the stalks before they are red. Put the capsicums into a jar. Boil sufficient vinegar to cover them, allowing a heaped tea-spoonful of salt, and half an ounce of powdered mace, to every quart of vinegar. Pour this, while hot, upon the pods, and when cold, tie down closely with a bladder. They will be fit for use in five or six weeks. Probable cost, 4s. 6d. to 6s. per hundred.
A straightforward spiced-vinegar pour-over pickle, but two things in it need translating: what a Victorian cook meant by "capsicums", and how much mace half an ounce actually is.
- What a capsicum is hereIn a British book of this date, "capsicums" means the pod peppers of the kitchen garden, not the large sweet bell peppers sold under that name in Britain today; many Victorian books reserve "chillies" for the smallest pods and use "capsicums" for somewhat larger ones. The instruction to gather the pods with stalks on, before they redden, suggests pods picked green.
- Go easy on the maceHalf an ounce is about 14 g, or something over two tablespoons of ground mace per quart of vinegar. That is an assertive amount by modern taste and will cloud the jar. Two or three whole blades of mace per quart give a cleaner, gentler perfume and leave the vinegar clear.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5% acidity — malt or cider vinegar suits these flavours — and use it undiluted, as the recipe intends. Anything weaker, or watered down, will not hold the pods safely.
- Prick the podsWhole chillies trap air and bob to the surface, where they discolour and spoil. Prick each pod once or twice with a skewer and weight them under the vinegar with a small glass disc or a folded cabbage leaf.
- Instead of a bladderA dried pig's bladder tied over the jar mouth was the standard airtight seal before screw caps. Use a jar with a plastic-coated or glass lid; bare metal corrodes against vinegar fumes and taints the pickle.
- StorageThis is a fresh-pack pickle with no heat processing, so treat it as a refrigerator pickle rather than a pantry one. Kept cold it will still be ready in the five or six weeks the recipe specifies, and will hold for several months.
- QuantityA quart of spiced vinegar covers roughly 250–350 g of small chillies packed reasonably tight — a jar of about a litre. The "per hundred" in the costing appears to refer to a hundred pods.
- HandlingWear gloves when pricking and packing, and keep hands away from eyes. Capsaicin transfers readily and lingers on skin long after washing.
Cassell's belongs to a period when the English larder kept a rank of spiced vinegars and pickled pods as much for seasoning as for eating: a pickled chilli or a spoonful of its vinegar went into sauces, made-up dishes and the fish-day condiment tray, an appetite sharpened by a century of Anglo-Indian cooking. Capsicums themselves are American — the genus reached Europe after the Spanish voyages and spread eastward so quickly that by the eighteenth century they were read as an Indian ingredient — and the name is generally traced to Latin capsa, a box or case, for the hollow seed pod. Mace, the lacy aril of the nutmeg, was often used as the warming spice for a clear pickling vinegar. The costing in shillings per hundred pods is a reminder that these were bought by the pod at market, or, as the recipe plainly prefers, picked from one's own garden in September or October.