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Peach Mangoes
Rub the fuzz off of large freestone peaches; cut in half and stone. Prepare a mixture of equal parts of white mustard, mace, nutmeg, ginger and celery seed and fill the peach cavities. Sew or tie halves together and fill with them a stone jar three-fourths full. They may be coloured by laying among them little bags containing turmeric. In early days they were also sometimes coloured with cochineal. Whole cloves may be added to the spice or pushed into the peaches themselves. Pour cold, strong vinegar over the fruit or, if to be kept in a warm climate, boil the vinegar, scalding the peaches; in either case sealing jars at once.
This is a preserving recipe rather than a dish to eat the same day, and the preserving method is where it fails. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then the specific problem.
- Why it should not be made as writtenRaw fruit is packed into a jar, covered with vinegar of unstated strength, and "sealed at once" with no processing and no measured acidity. Peaches are themselves an acid fruit, so botulism is not the likeliest hazard here, but nothing in the recipe fixes the strength of the vinegar or the acidity of the finished brine, and an unprocessed raw pack sealed cold is unreliable and prone to spoilage. Use a current tested pickling recipe if you want stuffed pickled peaches.
- "Strong vinegar" is not a measurementNineteenth-century household vinegar varied in acetic acid content, and homemade or barrel vinegar may well have fallen short of the 5 percent that modern pickling assumes. The recipe gives no ratio of vinegar to fruit, and no salt or sugar; it does say to fill the jar three-fourths full, but the acidity of the finished pack still cannot be predicted.
- The stone jar and "sealing at once"A glazed stoneware crock closed with a cloth-and-wax or bladder cover is not a hermetic seal in the modern sense. The recipe does allow for warm climates, directing that the vinegar be boiled and the peaches scalded in that case. Transferring the cold-pack instructions to a modern screw-top canning jar gives a much tighter seal, and a raw pack of unknown acidity is not made safer by being shut in more closely.
- White mustardThis means whole white or yellow mustard seed (Sinapis alba), not the prepared condiment and not mustard powder. It was a common pickling mustard of the period and appears in many spiced vinegars of the era.
- Turmeric and cochinealBoth are ordinary colourings and neither is the problem here. Turmeric tied in muslin was the usual way to tint pickles yellow without gritty sediment; cochineal, the dried scale insect, gave the crimson used for confectionery and pickles alike and is still sold as carmine.
- Freestone peachesThe instruction still holds for anyone reading this as history: only a freestone parts cleanly from the pit, leaving the hollow the spice mixture is meant to fill. Clingstone varieties, then as now, have to be cut away from the stone and will not give you two clean halves to tie back together.
- Rubbing off the fuzzPeaches of the period may have been fuzzier than many commercial varieties today, and the fuzz was rubbed off before pickling. The skin is left on, which would help hold the tied halves together.
In American and English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, a "mango" often meant not the tropical fruit but any fruit hollowed, stuffed with spice and mustard seed, tied shut and pickled in vinegar. The usage is generally traced to imported Indian mango pickle, which reached British tables long before fresh mangoes did; cooks who could not get the fruit imitated the pickle with what grew locally, and "to mango" became a verb. Muskmelons were the commonest subject, followed by small cucumbers and, as here, peaches. The spice mixture, mustard seed, mace, nutmeg, ginger and celery seed, with cloves stuck into the flesh, draws on the familiar pickling spices of the nineteenth-century store cupboard, and the turmeric bags are a reminder that pickles were expected to look vivid as well as taste sharp. Recipes of this kind sat in the preserving chapter of household manuals, where fruit put up in autumn was meant to carry relish and acidity through a winter of salt meat.