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Dessert

Sweet Pickle Mangoes

A preserved mango dish flavored with spices, sugar, and vinegar, then stored in a sweet brine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Sweet Pickle Mangoes

Ingredients

Directions

Brine the mangoes

  1. Remove the seeds from the mangoes and brine them for ten days in a brine that will float an egg.

  2. Every other day, pour off the brine, boil it, and then pour the hot brine over the mangoes.

  3. After ten days, remove the brine and rinse the mangoes with cold water.

Stuff and pickle

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar or a mixture of equal parts vinegar and water, and boil gently for twenty minutes.

  2. Drain the mangoes and prepare the stuffing by mixing black pepper, allspice, ginger, mace, cloves, grated horseradish, white mustard seed, celery seed, and brown sugar.

  3. Stuff the mangoes with the mixture and secure them with thread or ties.

  4. Place the stuffed mangoes in a jar, cover them with a mixture of three pounds of sugar and enough vinegar to cover, and pour boiling hot over the mangoes.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Mangoes
Main fruit; brining softens and seasons the flesh so it can absorb the spiced stuffing.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar in the pickling syrup.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper molasses flavour to the stuffing.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the mangoes and gives the pickle its tang.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp, pungent flavour to the stuffing.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp heat and pungency to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Brining with an egg-floating brine. The brine must be strong enough to float an egg; a weaker brine may not preserve the mangoes or draw out enough moisture, and the brine must be reboiled and poured hot each time to keep it safe and effective.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, pepper, allspice, ginger, clove, horseradish, mustard. 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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