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Oil Mangoes

A pickled mango dish made by filling mangoes with a mustard seed paste and covering with boiling vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish 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

Make the paste

  1. Mix the white and black mustard seeds, mace, cloves, horseradish, ground ginger, garlic, turmeric, celery seed, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Beat the mixture in a mortar until well combined.

  3. Add oil to the mixture to form a paste.

Fill and pickle

  1. Prepare your mangoes as usual for pickling, then fill them with the paste.

  2. Cover the filled mangoes with boiling hot vinegar and tie them up closely.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Ginger + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mustard + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

White mustard seed
Provides the sharp, pungent bite characteristic of the pickling spice paste.
Black mustard seed
Adds a stronger, more pungent heat to the paste than white seed.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp pungency that mellows as the pickle matures.
Ground ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice that balances the sharpness of the mustard.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savoury depth to the filling.
Vinegar
Acidifies the pickle, preserving the mango and sharpening its flavour.

The step that matters

Tie the mangoes closely after covering with boiling vinegar. Boiling vinegar softens the fruit and helps the spices infuse, while tying the mangoes closely keeps the filling inside and the fruit submerged in the acidic liquid, which slows spoilage.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, clove, horseradish, ginger, garlic, turmeric, celery. 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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