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Spiced Mangoes
— Mrs. F. Foland
Pare green cantelopes, cut off top and remove seeds, soak in brine of one large tablespoon of salt to one quart of cold water; change brine three mornings, washing fruit out thoroughly each time. On fourth day stuff with one pound of raisins cut in two, one pound each of currants and dates, stoned, shredded and as much skin as possible removed; one-fourth pound of citron, a little crystallized orange peel cut fine, one teaspoon of powdered cinnamon. Sew cut mangoes together and boil tender in one pint of vinegar to three pounds of sugar, with one teaspoon of powdered alum, two tablespoons each of ground cloves and cinnamon. The mangoes absorb so much syrup that they require much more than the same weight of fruit. Put away in crocks in the syrup, and cover. Do not eat until they have stood several months. They will keep forever and improve with age.
— Miss Ruth Hall
This is a sweet pickle of the old crock-and-cellar type, and its preservation depends entirely on conditions the receipt never specifies. The notes below explain the vocabulary and why the method does not transfer to a modern kitchen.
- Why it fails: uncontrolled storageThe melons are boiled, packed into crocks under syrup, merely "covered," and left standing for several months. There is no sealed jar, no boiling-water or pressure process, and no stated storage temperature. Whether the syrup is acid and concentrated enough to hold the fruit safely for months cannot be judged from the text; long ambient storage of a partly cooked vegetable in an unsealed crock carries a real spoilage risk, and if any part of the pack goes anaerobic Clostridium botulinum is a possibility, with toxin undetectable by look or smell.
- Why it fails: acidity is not measuredOne pint of vinegar to three pounds of sugar, poured over several pounds of melon and a pound each of raisins, currants and dates, is heavily diluted. The finished pH is unknown and cannot be assumed to be below the 4.6 threshold that makes a pickle self-preserving. The receipt offers no way of checking it; taste does not measure pH.
- Why it fails: no hot-pack, no headspace, no seal"Put away in crocks in the syrup, and cover" describes a lidded earthenware jar, not a hermetic seal. Surface mould and yeast growth were expected and skimmed off, which also raises the pH of what remains below. If you want spiced pickled melon, use a tested current recipe with measured vinegar strength and a specified processing time.
- The alumOne teaspoon of powdered alum was standard for keeping pickled fruit crisp; potassium alum is still legally a food additive but has fallen out of use, since large or repeated doses irritate the gut. Modern crisping is done with calcium chloride or simply with fresh fruit and short cooking.
- "Mangoes" means stuffed melonsNo tropical mango is involved. In American cookery through the nineteenth century, to mango something was to hollow, stuff and pickle it, and the name was then applied to the stuffed article itself. Here the fruit is green, unripe cantaloupe, firm enough to hold its shape.
- The brine stepOne large tablespoon of salt to a quart of water is a weak brine, on the order of 2 per cent, changed each of three mornings with the fruit washed out between. This was intended to draw water and firm the flesh, not to preserve; at that strength it does very little to suppress spoilage organisms over three days of soaking.
- Vanished pantry itemsCitron here is candied citron peel, sold at Christmas alongside candied orange and lemon, not the citron melon. "Stoned" dates are pitted; the instruction to remove "as much skin as possible" applies to the dates, and reflects the tougher, less processed dried fruit of the period.
- ScaleBetween the raisins, currants, dates, citron and orange peel the filling comes to well over three pounds. The receipt's own note that the mangoes "absorb so much syrup" that they require more than the same weight of fruit is plausible for hollow fruit standing in sugar syrup.
Mangoed vegetables were one of the durable habits of Anglo-American preserving. Pickled mangoes imported from India were a luxury on English tables by the seventeenth century, and cooks who could not get them imitated the idea with what grew at home, hollowing out small melons, cucumbers or sweet peppers, stuffing them with spices and sealing them up in vinegar; the transferred name stuck so firmly that in parts of the American Midwest a green bell pepper was still called a mango well into the twentieth century. This version belongs to the sweet end of that tradition, closer to a mincemeat than a pickle, and it reflects a household economy in which a crock of something spiced and sugared laid down in late summer was expected to be still improving at Easter. That it comes down to us credited from one woman to another is typical of how such recipes travelled: not out of print, but out of a neighbour's kitchen.