To pickle or make Mangoes of Melons

History

This is a stuffed pickle. Whole green melons are held under a brine strong enough to float an egg for five or six days, then slit down one side, seeded, scraped clean, and packed with a clove of garlic, sliced ginger and nutmeg, whole pepper, and a filling of mustard seed. Laid slit-upward in an earthen pot and covered with a scalding mix of one part mustard to two of vinegar, they are then stopped close to keep the air out.

The name is the puzzle worth untangling. Here "mango" is not the tropical fruit but a verb: in eighteenth-century kitchens, to mango something was to stuff and pickle it, and cooks mangoed a whole pantry of substitutes — cucumbers, unripe peaches, even asparagus, so that one could mango peaches or trade jars of mangoed asparagus. The word carried the memory of a luxury. The true East Indian mango could not survive the long voyage to England or the New World in an edible state, so it arrived preserved — pickled — and cooks took to mangoing what grew close to home in an effort to reproduce that imported delicacy, a green melon standing in for a fruit few had ever tasted fresh. Simmons's version, set down in the first cookbook written by an American, shows the English technique fully at home in a New England kitchen, down to the earthen crock and the close-stopped seal.

What the record keeps is the method, not the table. It does not tell us whose melons these were, how often a household reached for a mangoed melon rather than the plainer pickled cucumber that sits a page away, or how a cook who had likely never seen a fresh mango pictured the delicacy she was imitating. Those particulars the page does not preserve.

Ingredients

• green melons
• salt
• 1 clove garlic
• ginger
• nutmeg
• whole pepper
• mustard seeds
• 1 part mustard
• 2 parts vinegar

Instructions

1. Make a brine strong enough to bear an egg and pour it boiling hot over the green melons, keeping them submerged.
2. Let them stand five or six days.
3. Take them out, slit them down one side, remove all the seeds, scrape the insides well, and wash clean with cold water.
4. Fill each melon proportionably with a clove of garlic, a little sliced ginger and nutmeg, and a little whole pepper, then top up with mustard seeds.
5. Lay the melons in an earthen pot with the slit upwards.
6. Combine one part mustard with two parts vinegar, enough to cover, and pour over them scalding hot.
7. Keep them closely stopped.