Melon Mangoes
Take small green muskmelons; place in earthen or wooden receptacles and pour over them hot brine in which a little alum has been dissolved. Repeat twice and let stand in brine six days after scalding last time, when place in kettle; scald and let stand over night. Repeat this at intervals of several hours three times, letting stand last time twenty-four hours. Remove one section of the melon and scoop out the inside. Wash and soak twelve hours in acidulated water. Make a stuffing of onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, horseradish, etc. Drain the melons. Place first in them a few cloves, cinnamon, ginger, white mustard seed and horseradish, then the filling. Replace and sew on the removed section; place melons in large receptacle, cut side up, and pour over them spiced vinegar (Place weights on them), letting stand six days. Drain and cover with unspiced vinegar for indefinite keeping.
This is a stuffed melon pickle of the kind that filled nineteenth-century crocks, and it cannot be reproduced safely from these directions. The points below explain the terminology and why the method fails a modern safety standard.
- "Mango" here is not the tropical fruitImported Indian mango pickle reached England by the mid-seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth English and American cooks were using "mango" for any small fruit hollowed, stuffed with spices and pickled in imitation of it. A "melon mango" is a green muskmelon treated this way.
- No brine strength is given"Hot brine" could mean anything from a 5 percent salt solution to saturation, and the entire preservation of the melon over six days of standing depends on that number. Without it there is no way to know whether the melon is being cured or merely soaked at room temperature in a medium that supports spoilage organisms.
- No vinegar strength is given eitherSafe pickling of a low-acid vegetable requires vinegar of a known acidity, conventionally 5 percent, in a known ratio to the food. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely and was often homemade and weak. "Spiced vinegar" and "unspiced vinegar" here are unquantified.
- The stuffing is low-acid and sits at the centreOnions, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans and horseradish are packed into a sewn-up cavity, then weighted under vinegar. Acid has to penetrate a closed melon and a dense filling to reach the middle, and nothing in the method verifies that it does. That interior is exactly the environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow.
- "Indefinite keeping" means unsealed ambient storage"Indefinite keeping" is left undefined -- The recipe names no sealing, no processing in a boiling-water bath, and no temperature anywhere. The repeated "scald and let stand over night" cycles hold the melons in the range where bacteria multiply for hours at a time.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard nineteenth-century crisping agent for pickles and is still sold, but it is no longer recommended: it contributes nothing to preservation, can produce an astringent flavour, and in quantity causes gastric irritation. Current practice relies on fresh produce, trimmed blossom ends and calcium chloride instead.
- If you want stuffed melon pickleUse a current tested recipe from a recognised extension service, with weighed salt, measured 5 percent vinegar and a specified processing time. Do not scale or adapt these directions.
The stuffed "mango" is one of the clearest traces of the East India trade in Anglo-American cookery. Genuine mango pickle came into England by ship in the seventeenth century, expensive and much admired, and cooks set about imitating it with what grew at home: small green muskmelons, cucumbers, unripe peaches, even bell peppers, hollowed out and packed with spices, mustard seed and horseradish. By the nineteenth century the verb had followed the noun, and American recipe books speak freely of "mangoed" melons and peppers; the mango pepper of Midwestern seed catalogues is a survival of the same usage. Recipes like this one, with their six-day standings and repeated scaldings in a crock under weights, belong to a household economy in which a cook could attend to a vessel in the cellar every few hours for a fortnight, and in which a barrel of pickles was a winter necessity rather than a relish. The vagueness about salt and vinegar strength is perhaps best read not as carelessness so much as an assumption a modern reader can only infer that the reader had made brine and pickle before and did not need to be told.