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Peach Mangoes
Select large free stone peaches. Use them before they begin to mellow. Lay the fruit in a strong brine for a week. Dry them, cut a slice from the side of each peach and remove the stone, saving the slice to replace after the peach is stuffed. Make a stuffing of one teaspoon each ground nutmeg, mustard, mace, white sugar, celery seed and salad oil, a clove of garlic, chopped, a pinch of ginger, a dozen whole peppercorns, and a tablespoon of scraped horseradish. Mix all well and stuff into the hole in the peach.
Make it as full as it will hold, replace the slice cut out, sew in with strong linen thread and put the peaches into pickle. Make this by adding a cup of brown sugar to a gallon of vinegar and a half-teaspoon of cayenne.
PEPPER MANGOES, No. 1-Remove the stem end of green peppers, carefully extract the seeds, and lay the peppers in strongly salted water for twenty-four hours. Chop cabbage fine, and to every quart allow one tablespoon of salt, two tablespoons of white mustard seed, one tablespoon of cloves, one tablespoon of cinnamon and one cup of sugar. Mix well together, drain the pepper pods, stuff them with the mixture, replace the cap and sew it to position. Pack the peppers in a stone jar and cover them with strong, cold vinegar. They are ready to use in two or three weeks.
PEPPER MANGOES, No. 2-Use large green peppers, cut a slit in the side and remove the seeds with a knife or an oysterfork. Be careful not to touch them with your fingers at the risk of burning. Prepare a stuffing by the same recipe as that for the peach mangoes; fill the peppers with this, sew up the slit, lay them in a deep stone jar, and pour boiling vinegar on them. This must be drained off, reheated and poured over the peppers again three times, with an interval of two days between scaldings. Four months will be required to ripen these for the table.
Three related stuffed pickles from the era when "to mango" meant to hollow, stuff and pickle. The instructions assume a stoneware crock in a cold cellar and vinegar of unknown strength, so a few things need pinning down before you start.
- The brine is unspecified"strong brine" in a book of this date usually means a heavily salted solution, often described as strong enough to float an egg, on the order of a pound of salt to a gallon of water. The week-long soak is presumably there to firm the peaches so they do not collapse in the vinegar.
- Vinegar acidity"strong vinegar" here means full-strength, undiluted vinegar, but its acidity is unknown and period vinegars varied. If you make these, use commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent and do not dilute it; homemade or unlabelled vinegar has no reliable acidity.
- Storage is the weak pointAn open stone jar at cellar temperature for two weeks to four months is not a preservation method any current authority would endorse, particularly with garlic and oil sealed inside the fruit. Keep any batch refrigerated, or follow a current tested pickling recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
- Salad oilThis means a bland, neutral oil, in 1911 usually cottonseed or a light olive oil. Any neutral vegetable oil works; the teaspoon is there to bind the spice mixture, not to flavour it.
- MaceThe lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold ground or as blades. Its flavour is close to nutmeg's but distinct, which is presumably why the recipe calls for both.
- Sewing the fruitStrong linen thread was the standard strong household thread of the period. Any sturdy unwaxed linen or cotton twine will serve, and the stitches come out before serving.
- Handling the peppersThe warning in No. 2 is sound. Wear gloves when seeding chillies or hot peppers; capsaicin transfers to eyes and skin for hours and does not wash off with water alone.
- Peach choiceFreestone varieties release the pit cleanly through the side cut. Use fruit that is full-sized but still hard, as the instruction to catch them before they mellow means underripe by eating standards.
"Mango" here is a verb turned into a noun. Pickled stuffed mangoes reached England from India in the seventeenth century as a luxury import, and European and later American cooks, having no mangoes, imitated the pickle with what they had: muskmelons first, then cucumbers, peaches and sweet peppers. By the eighteenth century "to mango" simply meant to hollow out a fruit, pack it with spice, sew it up and steep it in vinegar. The name outlived the technique in parts of the American Midwest, where green bell peppers were still sold as "mangoes" well into the twentieth century. The Butterick book prints all three versions in its pickle chapter.