Mangoes
Select green or half grown muskmelons; remove a piece the length of the melon, an inch and a half wide in the middle and tapering to a point at each end; take out seeds with a tea-spoon, secure one end of each piece to its own melon by a stitch made with a needle and white thread. Make a brine of salt and cold water strong enough to float an egg, pour it over them, and after twentyfour hours take them out. For filling, use chopped tomatoes and chopped cabbage prepared as in "Chopped Pickles," small cucumbers, small white onions, and nasturtium pods, each prepared by remaining in salt water in separate jars twenty-four hours; add also green beans boiled in salt water until tender. For spice, use cinnamon-bark, whole cloves, chopped horse-radish, cayenne pepper, mustard seed, the latter prepared as directed in "Chopped Pickles." Prepare three or four times as much cabbage and tomatoes as of other articles, as any part left over may be placed in jar with vinegar poured over, and is ready for the table. Use one, or, if small, two cucumbers, two or three onions, and the same quantity of bean and nasturtium pods, placing them in mango first, with two or three cloves, three or four sticks of cinnamon an inch long, and half a tea-spoon horse-radish, and filling up afterward with the chopped cabbage or tomatoes (mixing, or using them separately in alternate melons) pressing down very firmly, so that the mango is filled tight, sprinkling on the cayenne pepper last. Sew in the piece all around in its proper place with strong white thread; when all are thus prepared, place in a stone crock, cover with weak cider vinegar, let remain over night; in the morning place the mangoes, and the vinegar in which they were soaked, in a porcelain kettle, boil half an hour, place in a jar, cover with good strong cider vinegar, let stand all night; in the morning drain off vinegar and boil it, adding one pint of sugar to each gallon, and pour boiling hot over the mangoes; drain off and boil the vinegar three or four times, and they are done. This is not the usual way of preparing mangoes, but it is much the best. To pickle nasturtiums, soak as collected in salt and water for twenty-four hours, drain, and put into cold vinegar; when all the seed is thus prepared, drain, and cover with fresh boiling-hot vinegar.
This is a stuffed pickle of a kind that has largely disappeared, and the reasons it disappeared are partly practical and partly safety. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method does not translate.
- What a "mango" is hereNot the tropical fruit. In nineteenth-century American usage a mango is a small melon, cucumber or sweet pepper hollowed out, stuffed with spiced vegetables, sewn shut and pickled. The recipe assumes you know that and never explains it.
- Brine "strong enough to float an egg"The period test for a strong salt brine; an egg floats at roughly a ten to twelve per cent solution, well short of saturation. It is a soak, not a cure, and the recipe says only to take the melons out, without specifying whether they are rinsed.
- Nasturtium podsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, picked just after the flower drops and pickled as a substitute for capers. Edible, and the closing paragraph is a complete small recipe for them on its own.
- Chopped PicklesThe recipe cross-references another entry elsewhere in the book for the cabbage, tomatoes and mustard seed. Without that page the filling instructions are incomplete, which is worth knowing before starting.
- The vinegar is the whole problemEverything rests on "weak cider vinegar" and "good strong cider vinegar," neither of which is a measurement. Home and barrel cider vinegar of the period ranged widely in acetic acid, and modern bottled vinegar is standardised at a level the recipe never anticipated. There is no way to know what acidity the finished pickle sits at.
- Acid cannot reach the middleA whole melon packed tight with cabbage, onions, beans and a sewn-in lid is a dense low-acid mass. Vinegar poured over the outside and drained off repeatedly does not reliably acidify the centre, and the interior of a stuffed, sealed vegetable held at room temperature is precisely the anaerobic low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin.
- No processing step at allNo canning process -- The pickles go into a stone crock and then a jar, with hot vinegar poured over three or four times and nights spent standing at room temperature. There is a half-hour boil in the soaking vinegar, but no headspace, no seal and no storage temperature is given. Modern pickling of stuffed low-acid vegetables requires a tested, measured recipe with a known acid ratio and a specified process time; use a current one instead.
The American "mango" is a linguistic fossil. Pickled mangoes imported from India reached British and colonial tables in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a spiced, stuffed, vinegar-preserved fruit, and by the time the word had settled into American kitchens it had come to mean the preparation rather than the fruit — "mango" became a verb, and any hollowed and stuffed vegetable pickle could be called one. The habit is generally traced through English receipt books, where cucumbers and melons stood in for a fruit no one could get fresh. That the substitution outlived the original is why parts of the Midwest still called green bell peppers "mangoes" well into the twentieth century.