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Peach Mangoes
Take unpared, fine, large peaches (free-stones); with a knife extract the stone from the side, place in jar, pour over them boiling water salted to taste, let stand twenty-four hours; drop into fresh cold water and allow to remain ten or fifteen minutes; wipe very dry, fill each cavity with grated horse-radish and white mustardseed (prepared as directed in recipe for "Chopped Pickles), a small piece of ginger-root, and one or two cloves; sew up, and place in a stone jar as close together as possible. Make a syrup in proportion of one pint sugar to three pints vinegar; pour, boiling hot, over them. They will be ready for use in a week, and are very fine.
A stuffed vinegar pickle of the old school, where "mango" describes the method rather than the fruit. Nothing here is difficult, but two or three of the instructions assume knowledge the book expects you to already have.
- "Mangoes" means stuffed picklesNo mango fruit is involved. To mangoe something was to hollow it, pack it with spice, sew it shut and pickle it. Melons, cucumbers and peppers were treated the same way.
- Freestone peaches, firmThe recipe insists on freestones so the pit can be worked out through a side slit without splitting the fruit. Use peaches that are ripe in colour but still firm to the thumb; anything soft will collapse in the brine.
- "Salted to taste" is vagueThe 24-hour soak is a firming and drawing brine rather than a preservative one, and the later cold-water soak is there to pull the excess salt back out. Something in the region of 1/4 cup salt per quart of water gives a workable brine, though the book leaves the strength to the cook.
- The mustard seed referenceThe book sends you to its "Chopped Pickles" recipe for preparing the white mustard seed, so read that before starting. White mustard seed is what is sold today as yellow mustard seed.
- Sewing them shutUse plain cotton kitchen twine and a large needle, two or three stitches across the slit. The stitches must hold while the fruit is handled in and out of the jar.
- The syrup proportionOne pint sugar to three pints vinegar gives a sharp, barely sweet pickle by modern palates. Use vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity; anything weaker will not carry a fruit pickle.
- StorageThis is a fresh-pack pickle, not a canned one. Cover the fruit completely with syrup, keep it refrigerated, and use it within a few weeks rather than leaving the jar in a pantry as the original assumes.
- Yield and servingA quart jar holds only a few stuffed peaches. They were treated as a relish, served alongside cold meats rather than as a fruit course.
"Mango" entered English as the name of the fruit itself, by way of Portuguese manga from a Tamil or Malayalam source; the fruit was known in Britain chiefly in pickled form, which is how the culinary sense arose, and by the late seventeenth century it had turned into a verb: to mangoe was to imitate that pickle with whatever local produce would hold a filling. Since fresh mangoes were unobtainable in Britain and America, cooks mangoed muskmelons, small cucumbers, sweet peppers and, as here, freestone peaches, stuffing them with the hot aromatics — horseradish, mustard seed, ginger, cloves — that stood in for the spicing of the imported original. The Dixie Cook Book, an adaptation of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, prints this among a long pickle chapter that reflects a season-bound kitchen: peaches came in a rush in late summer, and a sharp vinegar pack was one of the few ways to keep them on the table into winter. The usage survives in the American Midwest, where a stuffed pickled sweet pepper is still sometimes called a mango.