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Stuffed Mangoes
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 1 ounce of garlic; mix it with 2 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 2 quarts of best vinegar, 1 ounce of Jamaica peppers, 1 ounce of whole allspice, 1 ounce of bruised ginger, and a teaspoonful 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.
Peaches may be substituted for the genuine mango, as the latter are difficult to obtain except in canned form.
A nineteenth-century "mango" is a small unripe melon hollowed out, stuffed with spice, and pickled whole. The method here is one of the older ambient-storage pickles, and it does not meet current preserving practice.
- Why this one failsA whole stuffed melon is sealed under bladder with nothing but hot vinegar poured over the outside, reboiled and thrown over again on three successive days "or more", and then stored without refrigeration. Acid has to travel through the melon wall and into a dense plug of garlic and mustard seed at the centre; there is no assurance the interior ever reaches the pH of roughly 4.6 or below that suppresses Clostridium botulinum, and the bladder seal creates exactly the oxygen-free pocket the organism needs.
- Unspecified acid strength"Best vinegar" tells you nothing measurable. Safe vinegar pickling depends on a known acetic acid concentration (5 per cent is the modern standard) and a known ratio of vinegar to vegetable. Neither is fixed here, and repeated boiling of the same vinegar drives off liquid and changes the balance unpredictably.
- Garlic in an anaerobic packRaw garlic is a low-acid, soil-grown ingredient, and garlic held in an oxygen-free medium without measured acid is a well-documented vehicle for botulism in home preserves. Packing an ounce of it into a sealed cavity, rather than submerging it in measured acid, is the part of this recipe that cannot be salvaged.
- No heat processNothing is held at a controlled temperature for a controlled time. Current practice for any pickle intended for shelf storage is a boiling-water process in sealed jars, with times set by jar size. If you want stuffed pickled melon or peaches, use a tested current recipe.
- Reading the old terms"Jamaica pepper" is the older English name for allspice. "Bruised ginger" means whole dried root cracked with the flat of a knife to open it, not ground ginger. "Tie down with bladder" refers to a sheet of cleaned animal bladder, the standard airtight cover before rubber-ringed jars.
- The melon in questionThe "sort generally used for pickling" was a small, firm, immature muskmelon or a mango melon (Cucumis melo var. chito), picked hard and green. Ordinary supermarket melons are bred for sugar and softness and are not the same material.