Skip to main content
Main

Oil Mangoes

Oil Mangoes are mangoes filled with a paste of ginger, horseradish, mustard seed, garlic, pepper, cloves, mace, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Oil Mangoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mangoes

  1. Soak mangoes in saltwater until yellow, then scald until green.

Make the paste

  1. Soak the ginger, horseradish, mustard seed, garlic, black pepper, cloves, and mace.

  2. Beat the soaked ingredients together in a mortar.

  3. Mix the beaten ingredients with prepared mustard and enough sweet oil to form a paste.

Fill and cover

  1. Fill the mangoes with the paste and place any leftover mixture between the layers.

  2. Pour boiling vinegar over the mangoes until fully covered.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Horseradish + garlictop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Race ginger
Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the pickling paste its bite.
Horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent heat that intensifies the paste's flavour.
Mustard seed
Adds pungency and body to the paste, bringing a sharp, biting flavour.
Garlic
Adds pungent, savoury depth to the paste.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharpness and helps bind the paste into a spreadable mixture.
Boiling vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the mangoes and gives them a tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Pour boiling vinegar over the mangoes until fully covered. Mangoes must be completely submerged so no surface is exposed to air and spoilage organisms. Vinegar's acidity preserves the fruit, and boiling it helps it penetrate and soften the flesh.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, horseradish, mustard, garlic, pepper, clove, vinegar):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, horseradish, mustard, garlic, pepper, clove, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes