Home › Pickles and Relishes › Pepper Mangoes
Pepper Mangoes
Green peppers Brine 1 quart chopped cabbage 1 tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon cloves 2 tablespoons white mustard seed 1 tablespoon cinnamon 1 cup sugar Vinegar Remove the stem ends of green peppers, carefully extract the seeds and midribs and lay the peppers in strongly salted water (one-half cup salt to two quarts water) for twenty-four hours. Chop the cabbage fine and add the salt, mustard seed, cloves, cinnamon and sugar, mixing them well. Drain the peppers, stuff them with the prepared cabbage, replace the pepper caps and tie them in position. Pack the peppers in a stone jar and cover them with strong cold vinegar. They will be ready to use in two or three weeks. The amount of stuffing will need to be increased if many peppers are used. In increasing, keep the same proportions of ingredients.
A cold-pack crock pickle: peppers are brined, stuffed with spiced cabbage, and left to cure in raw vinegar for two or three weeks. Nothing is cooked, so the vinegar's strength and keeping the peppers submerged are what carry the recipe.
- Use vinegar of known strength"Strong cold vinegar" meant a full-strength pickling vinegar. Use cider or white vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it; weaker or homemade vinegar of unknown strength will not hold an unheated pickle.
- This is a crock pickle, not a canned oneThere is no boiling-water processing here, and none should be improvised. Cure and store the jar in the refrigerator, and treat it as a keep-cold pickle to be eaten within a couple of months rather than shelf-stable preserve. If you want jars for the pantry, use a current tested recipe.
- "Stone jar"A glazed earthenware crock. Any nonreactive vessel works -- glass or food-grade plastic. Avoid aluminum, copper, or chipped enamel, which raw vinegar will attack.
- Keep everything under the vinegarStuffed peppers float. Weight them with a small plate or a water-filled zip bag so no cabbage sits above the liquid; exposed vegetable is where mold starts.
- Yield is unstatedThe recipe gives no count of peppers, and a quart of chopped cabbage will fill only a handful of medium bell peppers. The note at the end is the author's own scaling instruction: multiply the whole stuffing mixture, keeping proportions.
- SpicesA tablespoon each of cloves and cinnamon. The recipe does not say whether these are whole or ground; whole cloves and broken stick cinnamon are the likelier reading for a vinegar pickle, since ground spice will cloud the vinegar and settle as grit. White mustard seed is ordinary yellow mustard seed.
- The 24-hour brineHalf a cup of salt to two quarts of water is a firming brine; it draws water out so the peppers stay crisp in the vinegar. Drain well but do not rinse away all the salt, and use pickling or kosher salt, since iodized salt darkens the brine.
- Tying the capsPlain cotton kitchen twine, wrapped around the pepper like a parcel. The caps can be left on the finished pickle; they come off when the pepper is sliced for the table.