Mangoes
Take small green muskmelons or canteloupes. Cut a small square from the side of each one and with a teaspoon scrape out all the seeds. Make a brine of one pint of salt to four quarts of water. Cover the mangoes with it while it boils. Let them stand two days; then drain them and stuff with one quart of chopped cabbage, one tablespoonful of sweet peppers chopped fine, one cupful of little whole cucumbers, a few pepper corns, one cupful of white mustard seed, one-half cupful of sugar, one-half cupful of the best olive oil, two tablespoonfuls celery seed, two tablespoonfuls salt and one-half tablespoonful of horseradish. Pour boiling vinegar over them, having added to it one pound of white sugar.
These "mangoes" are stuffed pickled melons, not tropical fruit. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to pack and cover a crock, so several working details are left out.
- What to buySmall, immature muskmelons or cantaloupes, picked before the flesh softens or sweetens. Small green cucumbers and sweet peppers were commonly "mangoed" the same way and behave similarly.
- The cut lidSave the square you cut from the side. After stuffing, tie or sew it back in place with cotton kitchen string, or the filling floats out into the vinegar. This is the step the recipe assumes and never states.
- The brineOne pint salt to four quarts water is a strong brine, in the region of 12 to 15 percent depending on how the salt measures, and meant to firm the flesh rather than season it. Use pickling or kosher salt; iodized table salt darkens the melons and clouds the liquid.
- "Cover while it boils"Pour the brine over the melons boiling hot, then leave them in it at cool room temperature for the two days. They should stay submerged, so weight them with a plate.
- Vinegar quantityThe original never says how much vinegar, only that a pound of white sugar goes into it. For six to eight small melons packed in a gallon crock or jar, plan on about two quarts of 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar — enough to cover completely.
- Ingredient namesWhite mustard seed is ordinary yellow mustard seed. "Sweet peppers" means mild bell or pimiento type, not chilli. Horseradish should be fresh grated root; prepared horseradish in vinegar and cream is a different thing.
- The oilHalf a cup of olive oil in the stuffing is a period touch that gives richness but will separate and float. Modern pickling practice generally leaves it out; if you keep it, expect a layer on top of the jar.
- StorageThis is a crock-and-cellar pickle, not a processed one. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle, keep the vegetables under the vinegar, and eat within a few weeks. Do not seal it in jars and store it at room temperature — for a shelf-stable version use a current tested recipe with measured acidity and a timed water-bath process.
- Yield and useEnough stuffing for roughly six to eight small melons. Serve one whole or halved as a relish with cold meat.
The name is a survival from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when jars of Indian pickled mango reached English tables and were much admired. Cooks who could not get the fruit imitated the pickle with what they had — small green melons, cucumbers, green peppers — stuffed with spiced vegetables and put down in vinegar, and the borrowed name stuck to the imitation. "To mango" became a verb for the method, and stuffed pickled melons under the name "mangoes" appear in English and American receipt books from the 1700s straight through the nineteenth century, which is why the word could be printed with no explanation at all. The habit lingers in dialect: in parts of the Midwest a green bell pepper is still called a mango. The recipe also shows the period's pickle economy — a strong salt brine first to draw water out and firm the flesh, then a sweet spiced vinegar to preserve, with mustard and celery seed doing most of the flavouring work.