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Stuffing for Sixty Mangoes
1 pound black mustard-seed. 1 pound white mustard-seed. 2 pounds chopped onion. 1 ounce mace. 1 ounce nutmeg. 2 handfuls black pepper. 1 ounce turmeric, well mixed with cold water. Pound the mace, nutmeg, and pepper. 1 cup sweet oil. 1/2 pound English mustard. 4 pounds brown sugar. Mix all these well together, throwing in little bits of mango or cucumbers.
This is not a dish but a filling: the spiced mustard paste packed into hollowed melons or cucumbers to make what nineteenth-century American cooks called "mangoes." The quantities are for sixty of them, so the first job is arithmetic.
- Scale it downAs written this makes on the order of nine or ten pounds of stuffing. Dividing by eight or ten gives a workable batch for six or eight stuffed cucumbers or bell peppers.
- What a "mango" is hereNot the tropical fruit. In this period a mango is a small muskmelon, cucumber, or sweet pepper, hollowed, stuffed with spiced mustard, tied shut and pickled in vinegar. This page gives neither the vegetable nor the vinegar, so it presumably depends on a separate mango receipt elsewhere in the book.
- Sweet oilOlive oil, which was commonly sold under that name in the nineteenth century. Any mild olive oil works.
- English mustardDry mustard powder, not the prepared paste in a jar. Colman's is the direct descendant. Half a pound is a great deal of heat; it mellows over weeks in the vinegar.
- Black mustard-seedTrue black mustard is scarce in retail spice aisles; the brown mustard seed sold for pickling and Indian cooking is the usual substitute and is close enough in pungency.
- Two handfuls of black pepperGenuinely ambiguous. A handful of peppercorns is roughly a third to a half cup, so read this as somewhere between two-thirds and a full cup, and taste as you pound.
- Pounding and the turmeric slurryMace, nutmeg and pepper are pounded from whole spice; pre-ground versions will be flatter but usable. Slaking the turmeric in cold water first, as directed, keeps it from clumping into yellow pockets in the paste.
- The hinge: acid and coldThe stuffing contains raw onion and oil and no vinegar of its own. It was never meant to be stored on its own; it belongs inside a vegetable that is then submerged in vinegar. Keep any surplus paste refrigerated and use it within a few days rather than holding it at room temperature.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, is full of receipts that assume a great deal of unstated context, and this is one of them. The "mango" of American cookbooks takes its name from the imported Indian mango pickles that reached Britain and the colonies; lacking mango trees, cooks hollowed out small muskmelons, cucumbers, or sweet peppers, packed them with mustard and spice, and called the result the same thing. The word stuck so firmly to the vegetable that in parts of the American Midwest a green bell pepper was still called a mango well into the twentieth century. The scale here, stuffing enough for sixty, is a reminder that pickling was an autumn production job for a whole household, not an afternoon's project.