Skip to main content
Main

Pepper Mangoes with Oil

A pickled stuffed bell pepper filled with onions, cucumbers, mustard, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,281 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pepper Mangoes with Oil

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers

  1. Cut a slit in each pepper and remove the seeds.

  2. Soak the peppers in salt water for 2 days.

  3. Rinse the peppers to freshen them.

Stuff and pickle

  1. Stuff the peppers with a mixture of chopped onions, pickled cucumbers, mustard, dry mustard, black pepper, and sweet oil.

  2. Sew the peppers closed.

  3. Place them in a jar and pour boiling vinegar over them.

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. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Bell peppers
Form the vessel that holds the stuffing and takes up the pickling brine.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the peppers during the long salt soak, firming them and seasoning them.
Onions
Add sharp, aromatic flavor and crunch to the stuffing.
Pickled cucumbers
Add tangy, briny flavor and texture to the stuffing.
Mustard
Adds pungent, sharp flavor to the stuffing.
Boiling vinegar
Acidifies the peppers, preserving them and giving them their tangy pickled flavor.

The step that matters

Soaking the peppers in salt water. Salt draws water out of the pepper flesh through osmosis, firming it and seasoning it. Soaking too briefly leaves peppers soft and under-seasoned, while the full two-day soak is what the recipe relies on.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cucumber, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cucumber, mustard, 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes