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To Green Mangoes
After taking them from the brine, lay them in a kettle with grape-vine leaves between each layer of mangoes; a little alum sprinkled on each layer. Let them simmer all day, changing the leaves if necessary. If not green enough, put them on the second day.--Mrs. E.
This is one step out of a longer pickling process — the "greening" of brined mangoes — and it depends on practices that have since been abandoned for good reason. The notes below explain what the instruction assumed and why it should not be followed.
- "Mangoes" are not mangoesIn nineteenth-century American cookery a "mango" is a small green muskmelon (sometimes a cucumber or a sweet pepper) hollowed out, stuffed with spices and mustard seed, and pickled. The name was borrowed from Indian mango pickle, which the preparation was meant to imitate.
- Why the kettle mattersPeriod cooks often got their green from unlined copper or brass vessels: acid brine plus long heating dissolves copper salts into the pickle, and some writers of the day recommended the practice openly while others condemned it. This recipe does not specify the metal, and vine leaves and alum were also credited with holding the colour; but if a brass or copper kettle were used, deliberate copper greening was condemned by public analysts in the later nineteenth century and has no place in a modern kitchen. Copper can be leached in harmful quantities by a long acid simmer.
- Unmeasured alumPotassium alum is still sold for pickling in trace amounts, but "a little sprinkled on each layer" is no quantity at all. Alum is astringent and can be harmful in quantity, and repeated layering over a simmer that may run into a second day gives no way to know how much has been taken up.
- An incomplete preserveThe brine strength, the vinegar, the acidity and the final sealing are all elsewhere in the original book or assumed from the cook's memory. A pickle that is heated all day and then held without measured acid and a known process is a botulism risk, not merely an old-fashioned one.
- All-day simmeringEven setting the safety questions aside, a full day at a simmer reduces melon or pepper flesh to pulp. Modern pickling relies on short heating and calcium chloride or grape leaves for texture, not on prolonged cooking.
- If you want green picklesUse a current tested recipe from a reliable preserving authority. Nothing in this entry can be adjusted into a safe procedure.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, is a collection of contributed receipts from Virginia households, which is why so many entries end with an initial rather than a name — "Mrs. E." is one of the two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives credited on the title page. Stuffed pickled "mangoes" were a fixture of American pickle shelves from the eighteenth century onward, the name carried over from the imported Indian mango pickles that colonial and early republican households knew by reputation and price. The obsession with a bright green colour was general: cookbooks of the period offered vine leaves, spinach juice, alum and, more often than they admitted, a brass kettle. Greening by copper was already controversial when this book appeared, and food chemists are generally said to have been publishing warnings about it through the 1870s and 1880s, which makes an instruction like this one a useful marker of the moment just before household practice caught up with the analysts.","removed":"Corrected \"several hundred such contributors\" to the title page's two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives; softened the claim about published copper-greening warnings and dropped the \"both Britain and the United States\" parallel."}Ket�F�6ٺ�m��a�-P������a��-P�J1yGvNy�ږڔW9��s�6.���