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Sweet Mango Pickle

A pickled mango preserve made with mangoes, ginger, chillies, sugar, vinegar, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mango and ginger work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 280 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Sweet Mango Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mangoes

  1. Peel and quarter the mangoes.

  2. Steep the mangoes in coarse sea salt for 36 hours.

  3. Drain the salt water and wipe the mangoes dry.

Make and cook the pickle

  1. In a preserving pan, make a syrup with the sugar and vinegar.

  2. Pour the syrup over the mangoes, adding the ginger and chillies.

  3. Allow to simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the pickle when completely cool.

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. Mango + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together280 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Mango + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together256 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Ginger + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,126 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Green mangoes
Provide the main body and tart flesh that the pickle is built around.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the pickle and gives it its sharp flavour.
Dry red chillies
Add heat and pungency to the pickle.
Green ginger
Adds aromatic, pungent flavour that complements the mango and chilli.

The step that matters

Draining and drying the mangoes after salting. Salt draws water out of the mango and leaves it briny. Rinsing and drying the pieces removes excess salt and surface moisture, so the syrup is not diluted and the pickle tastes balanced rather than salty.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mango, sugar, vinegar):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Peppermintfits about as well
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, sugar, 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.

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