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Melon Mangoes
Choose small, late melons, green and sound. Wipe them clean, and make a circular incision round the stem, which piece remove, to scoop out the pulpy part and seeds. Make a pickle of salt and water that will float an egg, lay the melons in a broad-bottomed pan or tub, having first replaced the piece taken out, and pour the pickle over them, two inches above the top. In twenty-four hours take them out, and drain on a sieve. Make a seasoning of a small quantity of scraped horse-radish, shredded shallots, equal parts of bruised mustard and coriander-seed, a few peppercorns, allspice, pounded mace, and cloves. Fill the hollow of the melons with the spice, etc.; put in beans, small onions, and cucumbers. The onions should be peeled and boiled for a minute or two, the beans, etc., scalded, and the piece sewed on firmly with coarse thread, always remembering to lay the cut sides up when the melons are put into the jar. Boil as much vinegar as will be required to cover with the seeds of the fruit. Strew cloves, pepper, and put in a few capsicums before straining over the melons. Cover with a cloth, and let the jar stand near the fire for an hour or so. Next day, and for four or five successive days, make the vinegar hot, adding at the last heating about half an ounce of garlic, the same of white peppercorns, ginger, and cardamom seeds. Boil twenty minutes. Cover when cold, and set aside for use.
This is a nineteenth-century keeping pickle, and it cannot be reproduced safely by modern standards. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific reasons the method fails.
- Acidity is never measured or controlledThe whole preservation scheme rests on vinegar, but no strength is given and none is verified. The scooped melon shells, the scalded beans, the onions and cucumbers all release a great deal of water into the vinegar over the repeated heatings, steadily diluting it toward the point where it no longer holds. A pickle of this kind needs a known acetic acid concentration and a target pH; this one offers neither.
- A sealed, low-acid interiorThe stuffed melon is sewn shut with thread, then packed cut side up in the jar. That creates an enclosed pocket of low-acid vegetable matter that the surrounding vinegar may never fully penetrate — precisely the oxygen-poor, under-acidified environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. Garlic and onion, both added here, are recognised vehicles for the organism in insufficiently acidified preserves.
- Warm holding is the wrong directionStanding the jar "near the fire" for an hour, and reheating over five successive days, leaves the contents in a warm range that favours bacterial growth between treatments. The vinegar itself is boiled (twenty minutes at the last heating), but the stuffed melons are never brought to or held at any verified temperature.
- No sealing or processing stepThe jar is closed with a cloth, then "covered when cold" and set aside indefinitely at room temperature. There is no boiling-water bath, no headspace, no vacuum seal — nothing to prevent recontamination during storage. If you want stuffed pickled melon, use a current tested recipe with measured vinegar and a processing time.
- "Pickle that will float an egg"The old test for a strong salt brine: enough salt dissolved that a fresh egg is buoyed up rather than sinking. It is a genuine rough gauge of brine strength, and worth knowing even though the recipe as a whole should not be followed.
- Capsicums, mace and cardamom seedsCapsicums here means chilli pods, fresh or dried. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or in blades. Cardamom seeds means the black seeds shelled out of the pods, not the whole pods.
- Bruised mustard and coriander seedBruised, not ground — cracked under the flat of a knife or in a mortar so the seeds release oil but stay largely whole. Ground spice would cloud the vinegar.
An English "mango" of this period is not a mango at all. Imported Indian mango pickle reached British tables in the seventeenth century as an expensive luxury, and cooks set about imitating it with what grew at home — small green melons, unripe cucumbers, sometimes peaches — hollowed, stuffed with mustard, garlic and hot spice, and steeped in vinegar. The imitation was so well established that "to mango" became a verb in household books, and recipes for melon and cucumber mangoes ran on in English and American cookery well into the nineteenth century. It belongs among the pickles for good reason: the point of the dish was keeping.