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Cucumber Mangoes
6 large cucumbers 2 ozs. mustard seeds 2 ozs. chopped garlic 2 quarts (8 cups) vinegar 1 oz. white whole peppers 1 oz. bruised ginger 4 blades mace 2 ozs. salt 1 oz. mustard 1 oz. scraped horseradish ½ cupful currants Cut each of the cucumbers into two equal parts.
Extract the pulp, and add to it the mustard seeds, currants, and chopped garlic. Fill the cavities with this mixture, and arrange the cucumbers on their
A stuffed pickle in the old English-American style, using ounce weights for whole spices and a very large volume of vinegar. The method as printed breaks off partway through, so treat what follows as guidance for the stage you can see.
- Choose the right cucumbersLarge, mature field cucumbers with thick walls are wanted, not thin salad or English types, since the halves must hold a stuffing without collapsing. The recipe specifies only 'large cucumbers'; seedy, overgrown late-season ones suit the method best.
- Hollowing them outCut each cucumber into two equal parts (the recipe does not say whether lengthwise or across) and scoop the seedy pulp with a spoon, leaving a shell sturdy enough to hold the filling. The pulp is not discarded here; it is mixed with the seeds, currants and garlic and becomes the filling.
- Blades of maceA blade is one piece of the lacy aril that surrounds nutmeg. Four blades amount to only a small quantity of broken mace, perhaps a teaspoon, or a smaller amount of ground mace if that is all you have. The recipe assigns only the mustard seeds, currants and garlic to the stuffing, so the mace presumably goes into the vinegar.
- Two kinds of mustardThe 2 oz. of mustard seeds go whole into the filling, as the recipe states; the separate 1 oz. of 'mustard' is most likely dry mustard powder, presumably for the vinegar. Two ounces of yellow or brown seed comes to roughly a quarter to a third of a cup.
- Bruised gingerWhole ginger root, smashed or cracked so it releases flavour into the vinegar while staying in one retrievable piece. Period recipes calling for 'bruised ginger' may mean either fresh root or dried whole ginger.
- Salting firstMany pickle recipes of this kind salt or brine the hollowed shells and drain them before filling, though this one does not say so and lists its 2 oz. of salt without indicating where it goes. Unsalted cucumbers will release water and dilute the vinegar.
- Tying and steepingThe text breaks off at this point. In comparable recipes the stuffed halves are reassembled and bound with string or thread before going into the spiced vinegar, and pickles of this kind are left to mature for some weeks before eating.
- KeepingWith no processing time or sealing instructions given, treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a few weeks. For anything intended to sit on a shelf, follow a current tested canning procedure for acidity and processing time.
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American kitchens a "mangoe" was not the tropical fruit but any hollowed, stuffed, spiced pickle made in imitation of the mango pickles that reached Britain through the East India trade. Real mangoes could not survive the voyage, so cooks stuffed what they had: small muskmelons, green peppers, and above all large field cucumbers, packed with mustard seed, garlic, horseradish and dried fruit and steeped in spiced vinegar. The name outlived the substitution long enough that "to mango" appears as a verb in period cookery writing, and stuffed peppers are still called mangoes in parts of the American Midwest. The heavy spicing here, with mace, whole pepper and ginger, marks it as a direct descendant of the older English pickling tradition rather than anything newly invented for this book.