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Cucumber Mangoes
Choose large, green cucumbers, not very ripe, cut a long narrow strip out of the side of each, and scoop out the seeds with a tea-spoon. Pound a few of these with a little scraped horse-radish, finely-shredded garlic, mustard-seed, and white pepper; stuff the hollows out of which the seeds came as full as they will hold, replace the strips, and bind them in their places with a little thread. Boil as much vinegar as will cover them, and pour it on them while hot; repeat this for three days. The last time boil the vinegar with half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of cloves, two ounces of pepper, two ounces of mustard-seed, a stick of horse-radish, and one clove of garlic to every half gallon of vinegar. Put the cucumbers into jars, pour the boiling liquid over them, tie the jars closely down, and set them aside for use. Time, four days. Probable cost of cucumbers, 6d. each when in full, season.
A stuffed vinegar pickle in the old English style, where the spicing is done twice: once inside the cucumber, once in the final pouring liquor. The method is sound but the quantities are scaled to a Victorian larder.
- The hinge: repeated hot pouringsDraining off the vinegar, reboiling it and pouring it back over three successive days is what drives the acid and spice into a thick-walled cucumber without cooking it to mush. Skip the repetition and you get a raw centre; boil the cucumbers in the vinegar instead and they collapse.
- Choose the right cucumberThe recipe asks for large, green cucumbers, not very ripe. Ridge or pickling cucumbers, unwaxed and firm, suit it best; waxed thin-walled salad cucumbers are watery and will not hold a stuffing or stay crisp.
- Vinegar strengthUse a plain malt or cider vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid flavoured or wine vinegar.
- Spice quantitiesHalf an ounce is about 14 g, two ounces about 55 g, and an imperial half gallon about 2.25 litres. So per 2.25 litres of vinegar: 14 g mace, 14 g cloves, 55 g pepper, 55 g mustard seed. Use whole spices only; ground spice clouds the liquor.
- The stuffing"Pound a few of these" most likely means the scooped-out seed cores, mashed with horseradish, garlic and mustard seed to a paste stiff enough to pack, though the wording is ambiguous. Freshly grated horseradish is much sharper than the jarred sort; taste before you commit.
- TyingPlain undyed cotton string or thread, wound round the cucumber two or three times to hold the cut strip in place. It stays on in the jar and is cut away at serving.
- Jars and keeping"Tie the jars closely down" describes a bladder or paper cover, not a seal. Use clean jars with vinegar-proof lids, keep them in the refrigerator, and eat within a couple of months; these are a keeping pickle by acidity alone, not a heat-processed preserve.
- Yield and servingServing -- serve sliced across into rounds, as a relish with cold beef, ham or curry. The recipe gives no yield; make as much spiced vinegar as will cover whatever you pack.
- Cost note"6d. each when in full season" is sixpence in pre-decimal currency, which was not a trivial price for a single cucumber even at the height of the season.
Calling a stuffed pickled cucumber a "mango" looks odd now, but for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mango in an English kitchen meant a pickle, not a fruit. Indian mango pickle reached Britain through the East India trade long before fresh mangoes could survive the voyage, and cooks imitated its hot, mustardy, spice-heavy character using what grew at home: small melons, large cucumbers, sometimes unripe peaches. A verb "to mango" something is said to have circulated in recipe writing, and cucumber mangoes appear in English household books from at least the eighteenth century, often traced to Hannah Glasse. Cassell's, compiling for a late-Victorian middle-class kitchen that expected a shelf of pickles and relishes beside the cold joint, keeps the older name and the older method more or less intact, including the horseradish and garlic stuffing that supplies the heat mustard seed alone cannot.