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Pickled Peppers
Use the large green peppers, make an opening in the side of each and carefully remove the seed without breaking the pods. Make a brine of salt and water, having it strong enough to float an egg. Place the peppers in this when it is cold, and let them remain for twenty-four hours. Make a fresh brine, drain the peppers, and lay them in it, letting them remain another twenty-four hours. Drain them again, rinse in cold water, place them in a stone jar, and allow to twenty-four peppers one quart of vinegar and one quart of water. Heat the water and vinegar to the boiling point and pour it over the peppers in the jar. When perfectly cold, drain off the vinegar and throw it away. Heat fresh vinegar this time, adding no water, and pour it over the peppers while boiling hot. Cover the jar closely and set it in a cool place.
A two-stage salt brine followed by two vinegar soakings, the first of which is discarded. Everything about the method is aimed at drawing water out of the pods so the finished pickle stays crisp and the vinegar stays strong.
- The hinge: throw the first vinegar awayThe peppers give up salt and water into that first diluted vinegar, which leaves it too weak to preserve anything. Discarding it and covering the pods with full-strength vinegar is what makes the final liquid acidic enough to hold.
- "Strong enough to float an egg"That is a heavy brine. Mix salt into the water and test with a raw egg in the shell as directed rather than trusting any fixed measure, since salt crystal size varies.
- SaltUse pickling or plain kosher salt. Iodized table salt and anti-caking agents will cloud the brine and can darken the peppers.
- Vinegar strengthBuy a vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity, cider or white. Period vinegars were of unreliable and often lower strength, which is worth bearing in mind when following a recipe that changes the vinegar twice.
- "Large green peppers"Bell peppers, chosen thick-walled and unblemished. Cut a side opening and shake out the seeds without tearing the pod; many period pepper pickles were also stuffed through such an opening, though this one is not.
- The jarA glazed stoneware crock or a wide glass jar. Nothing aluminum, copper or bare cast iron, which react with vinegar and brine.
- QuantitiesOne quart vinegar plus one quart water, two quarts of liquid in all, covers about twenty-four peppers for the first soak. For the second you will need roughly the same volume again, this time all vinegar, since none is being stretched with water.
- StorageThis is a crock pickle, not a canned one: there is no sealing or boiling-water processing here. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use it within a couple of months, and discard the lot if the liquid turns cloudy, slimy or gassy.
Pickled green peppers were a fixture of American cellar shelves through the nineteenth century, and stuffed ones were widely sold and served under the name "mangoes" — a usage generally traced to the eighteenth-century habit of substituting local produce for the imported pickled mangoes of Indian trade, which is why so many old recipes tell you to make an opening in the side and fill the pod. The two-brine, two-vinegar sequence here is the same logic applied to cucumbers and green tomatoes: salt first to drive out water and firm the flesh, then a sacrificial vinegar to carry off the last of the salt and dilution, then good vinegar to keep. That it appears in a book published by Butterick, a dress-pattern company, says something about the period's household publishing, where sewing, cooking and etiquette were sold to the same reader as one continuous subject.