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Pepper Mangoes
Green peppers
2 tablespoons white mustard
Brine seed
1 quart chopped cabbage
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cloves
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: whole green peppers brined, stuffed with spiced cabbage, and left to cure in vinegar. Nothing is cooked, so the two things that matter are the strength of the vinegar and where the jar sits while it works.
- Vinegar strength is the hinge"Strong cold vinegar" meant full-strength cider or white vinegar, not the diluted kitchen vinegar sometimes sold for table use. Use a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity and do not thin it with water; the peppers and cabbage are low-acid vegetables and the vinegar is the only thing preserving them.
- Not a canning recipeThis is an open-crock pickle, meant for a cool cellar and eating within weeks. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle: keep it under refrigeration for the whole three-week cure and after, and do not seal it into jars and set it on a shelf. There is no heat process here to make shelf storage safe.
- White mustard seedThis is the pale yellow mustard seed sold today simply as yellow or white mustard seed, not the small brown Indian variety, which is considerably hotter.
- Cloves and cinnamonA tablespoon each reads as a lot, which suggests whole spice was assumed: whole cloves and broken-up cinnamon stick. Ground spice in that quantity would be likely to colour the cabbage brown and leave grit.
- The brining stepHalf a cup of salt to two quarts of water works out at roughly 7 percent brine. Twenty-four hours firms the pepper walls and draws out water so they do not dilute the vinegar later. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodised table salt is often said to darken the brine.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. Any non-reactive vessel works, glass being easiest to watch, but avoid aluminium, copper or bare cast iron, which vinegar will attack.
- Tying the capsPlain cotton kitchen twine, wound around the pepper and knotted over the cap. Leave the loops slightly loose; peppers shrink as they cure and a tight tie will cut the flesh.
- Yield and proportionsA quart of chopped cabbage will stuff only a handful of medium bell peppers; the recipe itself notes that the stuffing must be increased if many peppers are used. Allow enough vinegar to cover them completely, and keep them submerged with a small plate or a water-filled bag.
- ServingCut across into rounds so each slice shows the spiral of cabbage. They go with cold meat, and the pickling liquid is worth keeping for dressings.
"Mangoes" in American cookery has nothing to do with the tropical fruit. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cooks imitated the pickled mangoes brought from India by the East India trade with whatever hollow vegetable was at hand s cucumbers, small muskmelons, and later sweet peppers s stuffed with spice and cured in vinegar. In many kitchens "mango" survived as simply the word for a stuffed pickled pepper; in parts of the Midwest, greengrocers were still calling bell peppers mangoes well into the twentieth century. The recipe belongs to the era's autumn work of putting up the garden, and its logic s brine to firm, spice to flavour, vinegar to keep s is the same logic behind every pickle of its kind.