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Pickled Mangoes
Remove the peel from as many mangoes as may be required, cut them into halves to remove the stones, rub well with salt, and put them in the sun for two or three days. Wipe well, and stuff each with a mixture of two cloves of garlic, two cloves, one stick of cinnamon, a few slices of green ginger and green peppers, and a few onion seeds pounded together in a mortar; fasten the heads together with thin thread or cotton, put them into wide-mouthed bottles, pour over sufficient vinegar to cover, cork down tightly, and stand them in the sun for about twenty days. One or two tablespoonfuls of mustard oil, if poured over the pickle before adding the vinegar, will prevent its spoiling. The pickle will not be ready for use until it has been in the bottles for two or three months, or possibly four months.
This is an Anglo-Indian achar written in the loose, cook's-eye style of its period: no weights, no acidity, no temperatures, and a preservation method that depends entirely on strong sun and the maker's judgement. The notes below cover what the words mean and why the procedure does not meet current preserving practice.
- Why it fails as writtenLittle here is measured — not the salt, not the vinegar's strength, not the temperature of the "sun" — even though the oil and the stuffing spices are given in spoonfuls and cloves. A vinegar pickle is safe only when the finished brine is acid enough throughout, and this recipe gives no way to know that it is. Use a current tested recipe for mango pickle instead.
- Garlic and oil at room temperatureWhole raw garlic cloves held at ambient temperature for three or four months in a low-acid, oil-covered environment are the classic setting in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. The vinegar is meant to acidify everything, but the recipe gives no way to confirm that acid penetrates the stuffed, thread-tied fruit.
- The sun-curing stageTwo or three days of salted fruit uncovered outdoors, followed by twenty days of corked bottles standing in the sun, is a warm-holding step with no upper limit. Modern preserving does the same job with a measured salt cure and a controlled process, precisely because "put them in the sun" describes a different climate for every reader.
- Mustard oilCold-pressed mustard oil is high in erucic acid and is not approved for food use in the United States; bottles sold here are labelled for external use only. In South Asia it is the standard pickling oil, which is why it appears in a recipe of this lineage.
- "Mangoes" means hard green fruitThese are unripe mangoes, firm enough to halve and stone and to hold a stuffing. A ripe supermarket mango collapses under salt and will not behave like the fruit the recipe assumes.
- Onion seeds and green ginger"Onion seeds" in Anglo-Indian usage almost always means nigella (kalonji), which is not an onion at all; "green ginger" is simply fresh ginger root, as opposed to the dried powdered kind. Both terms survive in older British and colonial cookery writing.
- The bottlesWide-mouthed bottles corked down tightly are the period's answer to a preserving jar. A cork driven into a bottle is a less reliable closure than a modern lid, and the recipe relies on acid, salt and the mustard oil rather than on an airtight seal.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume ranges far beyond the Waldorf's own service, and this entry is one of a scattering of Anglo-Indian recipes of the kind that circulated in American and British cookbooks in the nineteenth century. Stuffed pickled green mango — bharwan aam ka achar in its Indian form — was familiar enough in English-speaking kitchens that "to mango" became a verb meaning to stuff and pickle, applied to cucumbers, melons and peppers when real mangoes could not be had; in parts of the American Midwest "mango" lingered as a name for a green bell pepper long after the reason was forgotten. The version here keeps the Indian spice set intact — garlic, clove, cinnamon, fresh ginger, nigella, green chilli, mustard oil.