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Pepper Mangoes
With a sharp knife take the cap out of the pod, then scrape out the seed. Lay the pods in weak salt and water for one hour.
Take hard cabbage, chop them very fine, and to every quart of cabbage, add 1 tablespoonful salt. 1 tablespoonful pulverized black pepper. 2 tablespoonfuls white mustard-seed. 1 teaspoonful ground mustard. Mix all this well together, drain the peppers, and stuff them with the mixture, and replace the cap.
Pack them closely in a stone jar, with the small end down-wards. Do this until the jar is filled; then pour on them strong cold vinegar. They are ready for use in three weeks. You can use spices and sugar, if preferred.--Mrs. W. A. S.
A cold-pack vinegar pickle of sweet peppers stuffed with seasoned raw cabbage. Nothing is cooked, so the acidity of the vinegar and the temperature of storage are doing all the work.
- What a "mango" is hereNot the tropical fruit. The pods are large sweet peppers of the kind still sold as bell or, in older seed catalogues, mango peppers. Choose thick-walled, squarely shaped ones that will stand upright when packed.
- The capCut around the stem with a paring knife and lift it out in one piece, seeds attached, so it can be set back on as a lid. Some period stuffed-mango recipes direct sewing or tying the cap in place with coarse thread; a wooden toothpick does the same job.
- Strong cold vinegarUse commercial cider or white vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, undiluted. This is the only preservative in the jar, so it should not be cut with water, and homemade or unlabelled vinegar of unknown strength should not be substituted.
- A quart of cabbageMeasured after chopping, loosely packed: roughly 1 lb of shredded hard white cabbage, or a little under half a medium head. One quart of filling will stuff four to six good-sized peppers.
- SaltUse plain pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt can cloud the brine. The recipe gives no proportion for the "weak salt and water" soak; the hour in it is meant to limber the pods, not to cure them.
- The stone jarA glazed crock; a wide-mouth glass jar works as well and lets you see that everything stays under the vinegar. Any pepper that bobs above the surface will soften and mould, so weight the top layer with a small plate or a zip-top bag of brine.
- Three weeks, and whereWritten for a cool cellar; the recipe names no temperature. Store these in the refrigerator instead, still allowing the full three weeks for the vinegar to work through the cabbage. They are a refrigerator pickle, not a shelf-stable canned good, and should be eaten within a couple of months.
- Spices and sugar, if preferredThe recipe leaves this open. Candidates in this family of pickles include celery seed, whole cloves and a stick of cinnamon in the vinegar, and sugar to taste for a sweeter chowchow-style filling.
"To mango" was once an English verb meaning to pickle something in the manner of the pickled Indian mangoes that reached Britain in the seventeenth century as an expensive import. Cooks who could not get the fruit mangoed what they had, and by the eighteenth century the word had attached itself to the vessel-shaped vegetables that took a stuffing well: small melons, cucumbers, and eventually sweet peppers, which in American seed catalogues were long sold as mango peppers for exactly this purpose. The filling here is a plain chowchow, the chopped cabbage-and-mustard pickle that ran through Southern larders, packed inside the pod rather than jarred loose. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (Marion Cabell Tyree, 1878) is characteristic of that book, which was assembled from contributions by named Virginia housewives and initialled accordingly; pickles and catsups fill a long chapter because a cellar of them was how a household kept vegetables on the table between gardens.