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Stuffed Peppers (Select large bell-shaped)
Select large bell-shaped peppers. Remove and save the tops with the stems, and take out all the seeds. Stand the peppers upright in a large bowl, put a teaspoonful of salt in each; cover with cold water and allow to stand for twenty-four hours. The filling consists of two quarts of finely chopped cabbage, a tablespoonful of grated horseradish, a half pound of white mustard seed, two tablespoonfuls of celery seed and two tablespoonfuls of salt. Put the mixture into the pepper, leaving room at the top of each for a small onion and a very small cucumber. Tie the tops on securely; put them in a jar and cover with cold vinegar.
A cold-pack crock pickle of the old school: no heat anywhere in the process, and no sealed jars. It works, but the ingredient list assumes a stoneware crock in a cold cellar rather than a pantry shelf.
- Use 5 percent vinegar, and plentyThe recipe says only "cold vinegar," so check the label for 5 percent acidity, which is what preserves the peppers. Old vinegar was variable in strength, and a weak one will let the cabbage filling spoil. Expect to need a large quantity to cover a crock's worth of stuffed peppers.
- Refrigerate, do not shelf-storeNothing in this method is heat-processed and the stuffing is low-acid cabbage and onion, so acid has to migrate inward through a whole pepper wall. Keep the crock or jar in the refrigerator and treat this as a keeping pickle of a few months, not a year on a shelf.
- The salt soak is the hingeTwenty-four hours in salted water is what draws water out of the pepper walls so they stay firm and take up vinegar. Do not shorten it, and drain the peppers well before filling or the diluted brine will thin your vinegar.
- Half a pound of white mustard seedThat is roughly 1 1/4 cups. White mustard seed is what is sold today as yellow mustard seed, the mild pale kind, not brown or black. It swells considerably in the vinegar, so pack the filling loosely.
- Two quarts of chopped cabbageAbout one medium head, cored and chopped fine, weighing somewhere near 2 lb. Chop it rather than shred it so the filling stays open and the vinegar can penetrate.
- Tying the topsUse plain cotton kitchen twine, wrapped around the pepper and over the stem. Anything synthetic or coated is a poor idea in a long vinegar soak.
- "A jar" means a crockIn a book of this period this is a stoneware jar or a wide-mouth glass one, with the peppers weighted below the surface of the vinegar. Any pepper that bobs above the liquid will discolour and soften, so use a plate or a water-filled bag as a weight.
- Yield and curingSix to eight large peppers, depending on size. The recipe gives no standing time; allow several weeks in the vinegar before the filling tastes of anything but raw mustard seed, and slice them across into rounds to serve with cold meat.
Stuffed peppers of this kind were known across nineteenth-century America as mangoes — a name carried over from the pickled Indian mangoes imported into England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were expensive enough that cooks began imitating them with hollowed muskmelons, cucumbers and, eventually, sweet bell peppers. By the time this book was printed the pepper version had largely won out, and "mangoes" in a Pennsylvania or Ohio pantry meant a stuffed pepper pickle rather than any tropical fruit. The filling here — cabbage, horseradish, an enormous quantity of white mustard seed, celery seed — is essentially a dry chow-chow packed inside its own container, and it belongs to the same autumn kitchen economy as the rest of the pickle chapter: the last of the garden preserved in a crock of cold vinegar without a fire being lit.