Home › Vegetables › Pepper Mangoes (Cut the tops from one dozen)
Pepper Mangoes (Cut the tops from one dozen)
Cut the tops from one dozen red and one dozen green peppers, and if you have them, from one dozen sweet peppers. Remove the seeds, save the tops. Stand the peppers upright in a tub, put one teaspoonful of salt in each, cover with cold water. Soak over night. In the morning drain, and wash well in cold water. Cut three good-sized, hard heads of cabbage on a slaw cutter, add to it one teaspoonful of ground allspice, a half cup of mustard seeds, two tablespoonfuls of salt, and, if liked, one teaspoonful of ground mace. Mix thoroughly and stuff the mixture in the peppers. Put on the tops and tie with soft twine. Stand upright in stone jars, cover with cold vinegar. Stand aside one week; drain off the vinegar. Cover with fresh cold vinegar. Add one cup of nasturtiums or two tablespoonfuls of chopped horse-radish.
A crock pickle of cabbage-stuffed peppers, sized for a nineteenth-century pantry. The whole thing hinges on acidity: nothing here is cooked, so the vinegar is doing all the preservation work.
- Use 5 percent vinegar, undilutedOlder recipes assumed strong cider or white vinegar. Modern bottled vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity is the minimum; do not dilute it, and do not substitute homemade or unlabelled vinegar of unknown strength.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleThere is no boiling, no sealing and no processing, so this is not shelf-stable by current standards. Keep the crock or jars cold through the first week, through the second vinegaring, and afterwards, and don't seal them for pantry storage.
- Scale of the batchTwo to three dozen peppers and three heads of cabbage yields roughly 24-36 stuffed peppers and needs a large crock. Scaling down, allow eight to twelve peppers to one head of cabbage; a jarful behaves the same way.
- "Slaw cutter"A hand-cranked cabbage slicer. A mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor gives the same fine shred; a knife works but the strands should be thin enough to pack tightly.
- The overnight salting mattersA teaspoon of salt per pepper under cold water draws out water and firms the flesh. Skipping it leaves the peppers limp and dilutes the vinegar as they weep.
- Nasturtiums means the seed pods"Nasturtiums" -- most likely the green seed pods, picked just after flowering, which were a common kitchen-garden substitute for capers; buds were sometimes pickled too. Horseradish is the alternative the recipe itself gives.
- Weight the peppers downStuffed peppers float. Set a plate or a water-filled zip bag on top so they stay fully submerged in the vinegar for the whole time, or the exposed tops will spoil.
- Timing and servingTiming -- The recipe gives one week in the first vinegar; it sets no period for the second, so allow further time before the cabbage tastes pickled through rather than merely sour.
"Mango" here is a verb turned into a noun. Pickled mangoes from India reached British tables in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an expensive import, and English cooks imitated them by stuffing and pickling what their own gardens grew — small melons, cucumbers, and later sweet peppers — so that "to mango" came to mean to hollow, stuff and pickle. The habit stuck hardest in the American Midwest, where green bell peppers were still commonly called mangoes at market well into the twentieth century. Peppers and cabbage both come in at once at the end of summer, and a crock of vinegar was how a household kept them through a winter of cold roast meat and bread.