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Pickled Bell Peppers
Pickled Bell Peppers. Cut a slit in the side of each pepper, and carefully scrape out the veins and seeds. Soak two days in a brine that will hold up an egg; then drain and wash in cold water. Put over the fire sufficient vinegar (do not have the vinegar strong), to cover the peppers, adding a little stick of cinnamon, a little blade of mace and a few cloves; when boiling pour it over the peppers and put them away. When they are wanted for use, take them out of the pickle and soak for an hour in clear cold water. Drain and stuff and bake.
The method is a standard nineteenth-century two-stage pickle: a long salt cure followed by spiced vinegar, with the peppers kept in an open crock until wanted. The vocabulary is easy enough to translate, but the preservation chemistry is not sound by current standards.
- Why this one failsSweet peppers are a low-acid vegetable, and the recipe deliberately weakens the acid that is meant to protect them ("do not have the vinegar strong") without giving any strength, ratio or quantity. Vinegar is poured over boiling hot and the peppers are simply "put away" — no sealing, no processing, no stated storage temperature. That combination, a low-acid vegetable in an unmeasured, diluted acid held at an unstated temperature, is the situation in which Clostridium botulinum can grow, and the toxin it produces is neither visible nor detectable by smell or taste. Use a current tested pickle recipe instead.
- The final soak makes it worseThe hour in clear cold water before stuffing is there to draw out salt, but it will also pull acid and salt out of the pepper flesh, leaving a stuffed, baked vegetable with little or no preservative left in it. The recipe moves straight from soaking to stuffing and baking, and allows for no gap.
- "A brine that will hold up an egg"The standard nineteenth-century test for a strong salt solution — an egg floats at roughly ten percent salinity and above, so this is somewhere in the region of 1 lb salt to a gallon of water or more, well short of a fully saturated brine. It is a genuinely imprecise instruction, and the salt is washed off again in any case.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy red aril that grows around the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece of it, whole rather than ground. It is still sold whole in spice shops, though ground mace is far more common now.
- Vinegar strength then and nowHousehold vinegar of this period was cider or wine vinegar of unpredictable acidity, not the 5 percent that bottled vinegar is standardised to today. This is part of why the instruction to dilute it further cannot be carried over.
- What the finished dish wasThe pickled peppers were not the end point. They were a store-cupboard item, taken out of the pickle when wanted, stuffed and baked; the recipe does not say with what.
Stuffed pickled peppers of this kind were widely known in American kitchens as "mangoes," a name that had nothing to do with the tropical fruit: pickled and stuffed muskmelons were called mangoes in the eighteenth century, in imitation of imported Indian mango pickle, and when peppers took over the same treatment the name followed them. Books of this period give whole sequences of such recipes, because a household that kept a vinegar crock could carry green peppers, a late-summer crop with no shelf life of its own, well beyond their season. The two-stage method here — long salt cure, then spiced vinegar — is the old preserving grammar applied to almost everything perishable, and the aromatics chosen (cinnamon stick, mace, cloves) are the same warm sweet-pickle spices that went into pickled peaches and spiced pears. Why it sits under a heading about meats is not clear from the page itself, though pickles were indeed a standard sharp accompaniment to roast and potted meats.