Mangoes
To a three-gallon jar of mangoes prepared for the vinegar, take: 1 teacup black pepper. 1 ounce allspice. 1/2 1/2 ounce ginger. 1/2 ounce mace. 1/2 ounce cloves, beat well, but not fine. Take one head of raw cabbage. 8 onions. 2 teacups of horseradish. 1 quart of mustard-seed.
Take half the beaten spices, and mix with the latter ingredients, also three cups of brown sugar; besides, put one teaspoonful brown sugar in each mango before you put in the stuffing.
It takes five pounds of sugar for a three-gallon jar. The balance of the sugar mix with the spice and vinegar enough to cover the pickle.--Mrs. H. C.
This is the stuffing-and-vinegar stage of a stuffed pickle, and it assumes an earlier page in the book that tells you how the "mangoes" were brined and prepared. Read as a historical document it is clear enough; as working instructions it leaves out everything that governs whether the finished crock is safe.
- What a "mango" is hereNot the tropical fruit. In nineteenth-century American cookery a mango is a small muskmelon, or sometimes a green bell pepper or cucumber, hollowed out, stuffed and pickled. The name transferred from the imported Indian stuffed mango pickles that these preparations imitated.
- The teacup and the jarA teacup of this period was an unstandardised measure, smaller than a modern 8-ounce cup, and the book does not define it. A three-gallon jar of this date would most likely have been a stoneware crock rather than glass, and the batch is a bucket-sized quantity rather than a preserving jar's worth.
- The missing first half"Prepared for the vinegar" points to an earlier operation given elsewhere in the book, typically some form of cutting, seeding and salting or brining before draining. None of it appears here, so the recipe cannot be followed on its own terms.
- Vinegar strength is unstatedThe only quantity given is "vinegar enough to cover." Household vinegar in 1879 varied widely in acidity, much of it home-made cider vinegar of unknown strength. Safe pickling depends on a known acid concentration reaching the centre of every piece, and this recipe never establishes one.
- A low-acid stuffing inside a sealed vegetableCabbage, onion, horseradish and mustard seed are all low-acid, and they are packed into the closed cavity of a melon or pepper where brine penetrates slowly and unevenly. That combination -- low-acid solids, uncertain acid, an anaerobic interior, long ambient storage -- is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which may give no smell or taste to warn you.
- No heat step at allNo heat step is given -- Nothing is directed to be boiled, scalded or processed, and the recipe does not say whether the vinegar was poured over hot or cold. Modern practice for any pickle intended to keep requires either a measured 5 percent vinegar with a hot pack and a boiling-water process, or refrigeration throughout.
- The sugarFive pounds of sugar for three gallons, as the recipe itself states, makes this a sweet pickle. Sugar at this level flavours and softens but contributes nothing to preservation; it should not be mistaken for a safeguard.
- If you want stuffed picklesUse a current tested recipe from a reputable extension service, which will specify vinegar acidity, jar size and processing time. The spice proportions above are worth reading for their own sake.
Stuffed "mangoes" were a fixture of American pickle shelves from the late eighteenth century into the early twentieth, and the name is a small piece of colonial trade history: preserved mangoes arrived from India as an expensive imported condiment, and cooks who could not get the fruit reproduced the idea with what grew in the garden -- small melons first, then green peppers, which is why bell peppers were still called mangoes in parts of the Midwest well into living memory. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (published 1878-79), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited on its title page to some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and neighbouring states, contains many recipes signed with initials, as this one is, and often assumes the reader has read the neighbouring pages. The heavy hand with black pepper, allspice, mace, cloves and ginger, all "beat well, but not fine," is characteristic of the period's sweet pickles, where whole and cracked spice was expected to keep giving flavour over months in the jar rather than release everything at once.