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Cucumber Mangoes
12 large cucumbers, I onion, ¼ ounce of cloves, 1 teaspoonful of mace, I root of horse-radish, I small head of cabbage, ¼ ounce of ginger, 2 ounces of whole mustard seed, 1 tablespoonful of salt.
Select the largest cucumbers you can find, but take them before they are too ripe or have yellow ends. Cut long, narrow pieces out of the sides of each and with a spoon scoop out the seeds. Chop the cabbage fine, add all the spices and seasoning to it. Fill the cucumbers with this mixture, put the piece into the side and tie it with twine. Put the cucumbers into a stone jar, cover with cold vinegar, add the horse-radish chopped fine, and in one week they will be ready for use. A few hot peppers placed here and there among the cucumbers improve the flavor.
If the cucumber mangoes become flat or tasteless, drain off the vinegar and cover with fresh vinegar, adding also fresh horse-radish.
A stuffed vinegar pickle of the old American "mangoing" tradition: cucumbers hollowed like little boats, packed with spiced cabbage, tied shut and left in cold vinegar. Nothing is cooked, so the quality of the cucumbers and the strength of the vinegar decide the result.
- The fractionsThe quarter-ounce quantities of cloves and ginger work out to about a tablespoon of whole cloves and a knob of ginger of similar weight (an inch or so). Two ounces of whole mustard seed is roughly 1/3 cup.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 percent acidity cider or white vinegar, undiluted. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength, and the recipe itself expects you to replace it when it "becomes flat".
- Keep them coldA stone jar in a cool cellar is not a modern kitchen. Pack these in glass, cover completely with vinegar, and keep them refrigerated; treat them as a fresh pickle to be eaten within a month or so rather than a shelf-stable preserve.
- The onionAn onion is listed but never given a job. Chop it fine and work it into the cabbage stuffing with the spices, where it clearly belongs.
- Cutting and tyingCut one long lid from the side of each cucumber rather than halving it, so the shell holds its shape when packed. Wrap twine twice around and knot it; the lid should sit flush or the vinegar will wash the filling out.
- Choosing cucumbersYellow ends mean a seedy, bitter cucumber with soft flesh that will collapse. Firm, dark, thick-walled pickling or field cucumbers hold up; thin-skinned greenhouse types do not.
- SaltOne tablespoon of salt for twelve stuffed cucumbers is very little by pickling standards, and it seasons rather than preserves. The vinegar is doing all the work here.
- Timing and yieldOne week gives a lightly cured pickle; longer in the jar lets the spice penetrate the cucumber wall. The mangoes are sliced crosswise into rounds and served as a relish.
"Mango" here is not the fruit but a verb. Genuine Indian mango pickle reached English tables in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an expensive import, and cooks who could not get the fruit imitated the effect by hollowing, stuffing and pickling what grew at home - small melons, green peppers, and above all cucumbers. By the nineteenth century American cookbooks routinely spoke of "mangoing" melons and listed "mangoes" among the pickle recipes with no mango in sight, and the muskmelon version was a fixture of Pennsylvania and Ohio kitchens. The stuffing of chopped cabbage, mustard seed, horseradish and warm spice is the same mixture that fills chow-chow and piccalilli, and the whole enterprise belongs to the late-summer glut, when cucumbers came in faster than a household could eat them fresh.