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Pepper Relish (Red peppers mangoes green)
6 red peppers (mangoes) 6 green peppers (mangoes) 8 onions 1/2 T salt 3/4 pt. vinegar Cook about 15 minutes and seal in bottles.
The wording is compressed even by community-cookbook standards, and the preserving method is the part that has not survived scrutiny. Some notes on what the words mean, and on why this one belongs in the reading pile rather than the canning pot.
- Why it fails: no acid you can count onPeppers and onions are both low-acid vegetables, and 3/4 pint of vinegar spread over twelve peppers and eight onions is diluted further by the water the vegetables release as they cook. Nothing here guarantees the finished relish sits below pH 4.6, which is the line that keeps Clostridium botulinum from growing in a sealed jar.
- Why it fails: "seal in bottles" is not a processThe instruction assumes hot relish poured into a hot jar will sterilise itself. It will not. There is no boiling-water bath, no processing time, no headspace and no jar size given, so there is no way to know the contents ever reached or held a lethal temperature. Use a current tested relish recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want to put this up.
- Why it fails: vinegar of unknown strengthHousehold vinegar of this period was not reliably standardised at 5 percent acetic acid the way bottled vinegar is now. A recipe that gives no acidity and no ratio cannot be scaled or corrected by eye.
- "Mangoes" means peppersThrough the Midwest into the twentieth century, a sweet bell pepper was commonly called a mango. The parenthetical in the title is the author clarifying, not adding a second ingredient. No tropical fruit is involved.
- 1/2 TAmbiguous in a book of this vintage. It most likely means half a tablespoon of salt, though older books sometimes used T for teaspoon; the amount is in any case far too small to contribute anything to preservation.
- 3/4 pt.Twelve fluid ounces, or a cup and a half. American pints, since this is an Illinois church book.
- If you want the flavourCooked-down peppers and onions with vinegar and salt is a perfectly good fresh relish, and fifteen minutes of simmering is about right for it. Refrigerate it, treat it as a week's condiment, and do not seal it away.
The Libertyville Presbyterian book is a standard specimen of the American church fundraising cookbook, in which contributors wrote down what they already knew and assumed the reader knew it too, which is why the method here runs to eight words. The word mango for a sweet pepper is the most telling thing on the page: it is generally traced to the era when "to mangoe" meant to pickle something stuffed, after the pickled green mangoes imported from India, and the name migrated in American usage from the treatment to the vegetable most often given it. It held on longest in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and you still meet older cooks there who call a bell pepper a mango. Pepper relishes like this one proliferated once home canning jars became cheap in the late nineteenth century, and the confident, unprocessed "seal in bottles" that closes the recipe is exactly the practice that USDA and state extension services spent the following decades trying to stamp out.