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Pickled Peppers
Take large green ones (the best variety is the sweet pepper), make a small incision at the side, take out all the seeds, being care, ful not to mangle the peppers; soak in brine that will float an egg for two days, changing water twice; stuff with chopped cabbage, or tomatoes seasoned with spice as for mangoes (omitting the cayenne pepper), or a mixture of nasturtiums, chopped onions, red cabbage, grapes, and cucumbers, seasoned with mustard-seed and a little mace. Sew up incision, place in jar, and cover with cold-spiced vinegar.
This is a cold-pack pickle: raw stuffed peppers sealed under unheated vinegar, with no acid strength, no measurements and no processing given. That combination is why it cannot be recommended today, though several of its terms are worth decoding.
- Why this one failsPeppers, cabbage, onions, tomatoes and cucumbers are all low-acid vegetables, and here they are packed raw inside a sealed pepper shell inside a sealed jar with cold vinegar and nothing else. Nothing in the method guarantees that acid penetrates to the center of a stuffed, sewn-shut pepper, and an anaerobic jar of under-acidified vegetables is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum. Use a current tested pickle recipe with a stated vinegar strength and processing time.
- The vinegar is unspecifiedNineteenth-century "spiced vinegar" was made from whatever cider or wine vinegar the household had, of unknown and often low acidity. Modern safe pickling depends on vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid used in a measured ratio to the vegetables; this recipe gives neither figure.
- "Brine that will float an egg"The old test for a strong salt solution, on the order of a pound of salt to a gallon of water. It is a genuine preservative step, but it is a two-day soak that is then poured off, so it does nothing to protect the finished jar.
- "Seasoned as for mangoes"A cross-reference to the book's own stuffed-pickle recipe. In American cookbooks of this period a "mango" meant a stuffed pickle, commonly a small muskmelon, not the tropical fruit; the reader is expected to turn back to that recipe for the spicing, less the cayenne.
- NasturtiumsBoth the flowers and the green seed pods were pickled and used as a caper substitute. The recipe does not say which is meant here, though the seed pods would suit a stuffing of this kind, and they are still worth knowing about in a modern, properly acidified pickle.
- "Sweet pepper"In this period the term meant one of the mild, non-pungent sorts then grown, such as the bell or bull-nose. It is the one part of the recipe that translates fairly directly, though blanching and hot-packing are how such peppers are handled now.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of American compiled household manuals of the 1880s, and its pickle chapter is essentially an inventory of how a Southern kitchen used up a late-summer garden before refrigeration: brine crocks, spiced vinegar, and a heavy hand with mustard seed and mace. Stuffed pickles like this one sat at the fancy end of that work. The term "mangoes" for a stuffed pickle is generally traced to eighteenth-century English attempts to imitate the mango pickles arriving from India, first with green muskmelons and later with peppers, cucumbers and even peaches; by the time this book was printed the word had drifted so far from the fruit that recipes could call for it without explanation. The nasturtiums, grapes and red cabbage in the third stuffing option are a reminder that a pickle jar was also a way of preserving small quantities of things too few to bother with on their own.