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Pickled Peppers
Cut the stems out in a round circle with a sharp knife and lay them aside to replace later. Fill the peppers with a mixture of finely chopped cabbage, grated horseradish, mustard seed and salt. Wash the peppers in cold water; fill them; replace the stem; tie them with a soft cord to keep the lids in; pack them in stone jars and fill up with cold sharp vinegar. They will be ready for use in two weeks.
This is a cold-pack crock pickle from the era before anyone measured acidity, and the gaps in it are the whole problem. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method cannot be followed safely.
- No measured acid, and that is the hingeSweet peppers are a low-acid vegetable, and the stuffing of cabbage and horseradish is low-acid too. Safety in a vinegar pickle depends on the finished, equilibrated acidity of the whole jar, and this recipe gives no vinegar strength, no ratio of vinegar to vegetable, and no measure of salt. There is no way to know where the finished pickle lands.
- "Cold sharp vinegar" is not a specificationHousehold vinegar of this period varied in strength and was frequently home-made from cider, with no guarantee of the 5 percent acetic acid that modern bottled vinegar carries. A recipe that relies entirely on vinegar for preservation while leaving its strength unstated cannot be reproduced with any confidence.
- The stuffing blocks penetrationWhole peppers packed tight with chopped cabbage, then capped with their own stem lids and tied shut, are close to sealed parcels sitting in brine. Cold vinegar penetrates a dense stuffing slowly and unevenly, so the centre of each pepper can remain effectively unacidified for a long time.
- Anaerobic and low-acid is the botulism combinationClostridium botulinum spores are common on root vegetables and garden produce, survive washing, and germinate in oxygen-free, low-acid, room-temperature conditions. The interior of a tied, stuffed pepper submerged in vinegar of unknown strength is exactly that environment. Botulinum toxin gives no smell, no taste and no visible spoilage.
- No storage temperature and no end date"Ready for use in two weeks" tells you when to start eating and nothing about where the crock should sit or how long it keeps. Crocks of this kind were kept in a cold cellar through the winter; a modern pantry at 20C is a different proposition entirely.
- Stone jarsThe original means a glazed stoneware crock, the standard pickling vessel of the day. Old crocks with damaged or lead-bearing glazes should not be used for anything acidic, which is the one thing they were built for.
- If you want stuffed pickled peppersUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, the vinegar-to-water ratio, jar size and processing. Do not adapt the text above by guesswork.
Stuffed pickles like this one were long known in American kitchens as "mangoes" — a name generally traced to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trade in pickled mango from India, which arrived in barrels of spiced brine and set the template. Cooks who could not get the fruit stuffed and pickled what they had: muskmelons, cucumbers, and, as sweet peppers became a common garden crop, peppers, though the order in which these substitutes took hold is not clear from the record. The filling here — cabbage, horseradish, mustard seed — is the standard chopped mixture, close cousin to chow-chow and the piccalilli family. Cutting the stem out as a lid and tying it back on with soft cord is a nice piece of pre-industrial practicality: the pepper supplies its own container and its own stopper.