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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Pack
Pickled Melons. - Take hard muskmelons that are late in ripening, cut out a circular piece around the stem about 3 inches across and through this opening remove the seeds and scrape out any part that may be soft or ripe. Pack the melons in a wooden tub, fill them inside, and cover them with salt and let stand until the salt is melted. Remove them from the salt, rinse with pure water and fill with a mixture of chopped peppers and onions with a few shallots, a little garlic, and a quantity of bruised mustard seed. Close the opening with the plug, and fasten it with thread or with skewers made of toothpicks. Pack the melons in a tub or earthen jar and cover with spiced pickling liquid boiling hot. Remove and scald the spiced liquid every day for four or five days, pour it back over the melons, and finally seal up the jars.
Or stuff the melons with a piccalilli or chowchow or any sort of mixed pickles, as desired. - Pickled Citron. Cut the citron into inch cubes, cover with weak brine. Let stand twenty-four hours and pour out on a cloth strainer to dry. For every gallon of spiced vinegar add 4 ounces of coffee sugar, bring to a boil and pour over the citron boiling hot. Let stand three or four days, each day pouring off the pickling liquid from the citron, scalding it and pouring it back. Finally, bring the whole to a boil and cook until the citron is very tender. Pack in suitable jars. Seal and store in a cool, dry place.
Peach Mangoes. -Select large freestone peaches and take out the stone through a slit in the side. Cover with weak brine scalding hot. Let stand until cool enough to handle.
Lift out the peaches on a cloth strainer, and wipe dry with a clean, soft cloth. Now fill the cavity with mixed spices to taste, as white mustard seed, cloves, mace, cinnamon, grated horse-radish, ginger root, etc., softened by placing all together in a thin muslin bag and immersing for a few minutes in boiling water. Remove the bag from the water, let the spices drip dry, fill the peaches, sew them up, pack them in jars, and fill to overflowing with a scalding hot sirup made of 1 pint of sugar in 3 pints of vinegar. Seal while hot. Let stand a week or two before bringing to the table. - Tomato Catsup. Wash bushel fine ripe red tomatoes. Quarter them, place them in a preserving kettle, and bring them to a boil. Remove from the fire and let cool until they will bear the hands. Then rub them through a wire sieve and add to the strained juice 2 teacupfuls of salt, 2 teacupfuls of mixed spices, 1 quart of vinegar. Boil over a slow fire for an hour or more, stirring constantly to prevent burning. Fill the bottles to overflowing with the hot liquid and seal at once. Thin for use, if necessary, with a little vinegar. Wrap in colored paper to exclude the light.
Four related recipes from the pickling chapter, all of them built on the open-kettle method: pour boiling liquid over raw produce in a jar, seal, and trust the vinegar. Some of the terms need translating; the preserving method does not survive contact with modern food safety guidance.
- Why the catsup is the real problemA bushel of tomatoes is about 53 lb of fruit, and the recipe acidifies the strained pulp from it with a single quart of vinegar - far too little to bring the batch reliably below pH 4.6. Bottled hot, sealed without any boiling-water process and stored at room temperature, this is the kind of under-acidified pack in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. Modern tomato ketchup recipes specify a tested acid ratio and a boiling-water process for a reason.
- Open-kettle sealingAll four recipes seal jars on the heat of the filling liquid alone, with no boiling-water bath afterwards. That gives a vacuum seal but no guarantee the headspace, lid and upper contents ever reached a lethal temperature, and a sealed lid on a spoiled jar tells you nothing. Use a current tested recipe with a measured process time.
- The unmeasured brine"Weak brine," "cover them with salt," "spiced pickling liquid" - none of it is quantified, so there is no way to know the finished acidity or salt concentration of the melons, citron or peaches. Pickle safety is arithmetic, not judgement, and this page supplies no numbers to check.
- The stuffed whole fruitEven with an adequate brine, a whole melon or peach stuffed with onion, garlic and spices and sewn shut is a dense, low-acid core that vinegar has to penetrate slowly from outside. Garlic and onion are low-acid vegetables that have featured in botulism outbreaks (notably garlic in oil and held sauteed onions), so an under-acidified pack containing them deserves caution.
- "Mango" as a verbA peach mango is not a mango. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "to mango" meant to hollow, stuff with spices and pickle in imitation of the imported East Indian mango pickle, and any fruit so treated - melon, peach, cucumber, green walnut - was called a mango.
- CitronThe citron here is citron melon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides), a hard white-fleshed relative of the watermelon grown specifically for preserving. It is not the candied citrus peel sold for fruitcake, and it is nearly inedible raw.
- Coffee sugarA coarse, large-crystal sugar, usually yellowish, sold under that name for use in coffee. Ordinary granulated sugar was the period substitute and is the practical modern equivalent by weight.
- Teacupful and bushelA teacupful in American books of this era is smaller than a breakfast cup - somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup, and genuinely imprecise. A bushel of tomatoes runs about 53 lb, which gives on the order of 25 quarts of raw pulp; after an hour or more of boiling down, the finished catsup would be considerably less.
- Wrapping bottles in coloured paperThe recipe's stated reason, excluding light, is sound: light fades tomato products, so the wrapping preserved colour. It did nothing about spoilage.
This page belongs to the long American tradition of the stuffed pickle, which reached the household books of the 1890s and 1900s by way of eighteenth-century English cookery's attempts to imitate imported Indian mango pickle - hence a hollowed muskmelon or peach being called a mango, a usage that survived in parts of the Midwest into living memory as a name for the sweet green pepper. Household Discoveries was a compendium aimed at the self-sufficient home, published when a farm family still put up produce by the bushel and the alternative to a full pickle crock was going without. The methods vary: the melons and the citron take a single kettle of spiced vinegar, scalded and poured back over the fruit daily for several days, while the peach mangoes are filled with syrup and sealed and the catsup is boiled and bottled. It was a reasonable technique on its own terms, and it predates any general understanding of botulism - the organism was identified in the 1890s, but tested home-canning procedures with specified acid levels and process times did not reach American kitchens until the extension bulletins of the following decades.