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Mangoes, Pickled
Take a melon of the sort generally used for pickling, first seeing that it is not quite ripe; cut off a slice from the top, and carefully pick out all the seeds. Shred finely one ounce of garlic; mix it with two ounces of mustard-seed, and the seeds of the melon. Now put this back as a stuffing, place the top on, and bind it down. Boil, in two quarts of best vinegar, one ounce of Jamaica peppers, one ounces of whole allspice, one ounce of bruised ginger, and a tea-spoonful of salt; when boiling pour it over the melon. The same vinegar must be put into a saucepan, boiled up again, and thrown over the melon for three successive days, or more if possible; then tie down with bladder to exclude the air.
This is an eighteenth-century-style imitation mango pickle, and the method belongs to a period before anyone measured acidity. The notes below explain the terms and then why the preserve itself is not safe to reproduce.
- Why it fails: no measured acid"Best vinegar" gives no strength, and a whole stuffed melon is a thick, low-acid mass that boiling vinegar poured over the outside will not reliably penetrate. Modern pickling depends on a known acetic acid concentration reaching the whole of the food, which nothing here guarantees.
- Why it fails: garlic sealed without airAn ounce of raw garlic packed into the cavity of a low-acid vegetable and then sealed airtight creates the kind of anaerobic environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow if the acidity is not verified. The bladder tie excludes air; without known acidity throughout, that is the wrong kind of container for this filling.
- Why it fails: no processing, no storage temperatureThe melon is never heated through and the finished jar is never processed. The recipe assumes a cold larder and a cook who will inspect the crock, neither of which is a control. Use a current tested recipe for stuffed pickles if you want to make something of this kind.
- "Mangoes"No mango is involved. In British and American kitchens of the period a "mango" meant a small melon or cucumber hollowed, stuffed with spice, and pickled in imitation of the imported Indian original.
- Jamaica pepper and allspiceThese are the same spice, Pimenta dioica. Asking for an ounce of each looks like a compiler's slip; either way it points to a heavily spiced vinegar rather than a subtle one.
- BladderA pig or ox bladder, soaked soft and tied wet over the mouth of the jar, shrank as it dried into a tight skin. It was one of the standard closures before screw-band jars and rubber rings.
- The melonThe "sort generally used for pickling" means a small firm underripe melon rather than a ripe dessert melon.
English cooks took to imitating Indian mango pickle not long after it arrived through East India Company trade, chiefly it seems from the eighteenth century onward, and because whole preserved mangoes were expensive and irregular in supply, small green melons and cucumbers were hollowed, stuffed with garlic, mustard seed and spice, and pickled in their place. The imitation stuck so firmly that to mango is recorded as a verb in kitchen English, and by the nineteenth century a recipe headed "Mangoes" in a British or American book commonly meant this melon pickle rather than the fruit. The recipe demonstrates the standard preserving logic of the day: repeated boiling vinegar poured over the goods on successive days to draw out water and drive in acid, then an airtight skin over the top. The technique was sound as far as anyone could then measure, which is precisely the limitation.