Oil Mangoes
1 pound race ginger, well soaked, beaten and dried. 1 pound horseradish. 1 pound white mustard-seed. 1 pound black mustard-seed. 2 ounces ground mustard. 2 ounces black pepper. 2 ounces turmeric. 2 ounces cloves. 1/2 ounce mace. 1 ounce celery-seed. 2 pounds sugar.
Beat the ingredients together in a mortar, and mix the mustard with as much olive oil as will make a paste. Then after the mangoes have been in brine two weeks, and greened as you would cucumbers, stuff them; if any filling is left, sprinkle between the layers in the jar. Pour over as much boiling vin egar as will cover them.--Mrs. T. C.
A stuffing paste for pickled "mangoes" — which here are not tropical fruit — with two problems: the greening step it points back to, and a brine and vinegar strength that are never specified.
- Why the greening step is the troubleNineteenth-century instructions to "green" cucumbers and melons often meant heating them in vinegar in a brass or copper kettle, sometimes with alum, so that copper salts dissolved into the fruit and set an artificial emerald color. Copper acetate in food is poisonous, and the practice had long been condemned as an adulteration. Follow a current pickling recipe instead; there is no way to reproduce the color safely.
- The pickle itself is unmeasuredTwo weeks in "brine" of unstated salt concentration, followed by boiling vinegar of unstated acidity, gives no way to know the finished pH. Modern pickling relies on 5 percent acetic acid vinegar in a measured ratio for exactly this reason.
- What a mango is hereIn American cookery of this period, to "mango" something meant to hollow it, stuff it with spices, and pickle it. The vegetable was usually a small green muskmelon, a green bell pepper, or an undersized cucumber — the name borrowed from the imported East India pickle it imitated.
- Race ginger"Race" derives from an old word for root (via Old French, ultimately Latin radix): whole dried ginger rhizome rather than ground. Soaking, pounding, and drying it would have been a way of reducing it to usable pieces without a spice grinder.
- ScaleThis is roughly four and a half pounds of solids plus two pounds of sugar — enough filling for a large stone crock of melons, not a jar or two. Any attempt at the idea in a modern kitchen would want a small fraction of it.
- Turmeric's jobThe two ounces of turmeric are for color, not flavor; it is what makes the classic yellow mustard pickle. It will stain wood, plastic, and grout permanently.
- Mustard and oilThe wording is ambiguous: the ingredients are first beaten together in a mortar, and then "the mustard" is worked to a paste with olive oil. It is unclear whether this means only the ground mustard or the whole pounded mixture.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, is a collection of contributed receipts, and the initials "Mrs. T. C." mark this as one household's version among many. Its subject reflects a long chain of borrowing: pickled green mango from India reached Britain through East India Company trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and English and then American cooks, lacking the fruit, applied the name and the spicing to whatever firm green thing their gardens produced — melons, peppers, cucumbers, even walnuts. Hence "mango" as a verb. The heavy hand with ginger, turmeric, mace and cloves is a direct echo of the imported original, and the same spice mixture survives, much reduced, in the mustard pickles and chow-chows still made in the American South.