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Tomato Mangoes
Select smooth soft green tomatoes. Cut from the stem end a piece sufficiently large to allow the removal of the seeds without breaking the tomato. Take out the seeds, stand the tomatoes up in a tub, with each top by the side of its corresponding tomato. Sprinkle a teaspoonful of salt in each tomato, cover with cold water and soak twenty-four hours. Drain by turning them upside down. Cut two large heads of cabbage on a slaw cutter, add to it a teaspoonful of ground cloves, a teaspoonful of ground
This is a stuffed pickle, not a fruit dish, and the text as printed breaks off in the middle of the cabbage stuffing — the vinegar, the spicing and the packing instructions are all missing.
- The recipe is incompleteThe verbatim text stops at "a teaspoonful of ground" and never reaches the vinegar, the sugar, the packing or the storage. There is no way to finish it faithfully from what survives on the page.
- Why not to preserve from itEven complete, recipes of this type give no vinegar strength, no acidity target and no processing time or temperature. Low-acid vegetables held in a crock at room temperature under an unmeasured brine are the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum; green tomatoes and cabbage packed in this way cannot be assumed safe. Use a current tested recipe for pickled green tomatoes if you want to make these.
- "Mangoes"In nineteenth-century American cookery a mango was any small vegetable or unripe fruit hollowed out, stuffed and pickled — muskmelons, cucumbers, peppers, green tomatoes. The name came from imitating imported Indian mango pickle, not from the fruit itself.
- Slaw cutterA wooden board with fixed blades, working on the same principle as a mandoline. A mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor does the same job; the point is thin, even shreds that pack tightly.
- The tub and the standing upA "tub" here is any wide non-reactive vessel — a plastic or glass tub, not bare metal, since salt and tomato acid will pit it. In comparable stuffed-"mango" recipes the cut-off top is fastened back on its own tomato after filling, which would explain keeping each top beside its fruit; the surviving text does not say.
- Green tomatoes"Smooth soft green" appears to mean full-sized but unripened fruit, evenly shaped and not rock-hard, so that it can be hollowed without breaking, as the recipe requires.
- The salt soakTwenty-four hours in salted water draws out moisture so the shells stay firm rather than collapsing. Draining upside down is not fussiness — trapped brine dilutes whatever goes in afterwards.
Stuffed pickles under the name "mangoes" run through American household cookery from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, and the usage is generally traced to English attempts to reproduce the spiced mango pickles that arrived through the East India trade. Since fresh mangoes were unobtainable, cooks substituted what their gardens gave them and kept the name for the treatment: hollow, salt, stuff with cabbage or mustard and spice, tie shut, cover with vinegar. Green tomatoes came late to the tradition, and they were prized for exactly the reason gardeners still value them — a hard frost leaves a great deal of unripened fruit that has to be used for something. The heavy hand with cloves and other ground spice is typical of the period's pickling, and spice is often said to have done preservative as well as flavouring work.