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Stuffing for Forty Mangoes

A preserved mango dish with a spice paste and sweet filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 ↓

Stuffing for Forty Mangoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mangoes

  1. Wash the mangoes.

  2. Cut out a small plug and remove all seeds.

  3. Soak the mangoes in salt water for a day or two.

  4. Boil the mangoes in clear water until tender enough to pierce with a straw.

Make the stuffing

  1. Mix ginger, mace, mustard seed, nutmeg, horseradish, turmeric, chopped onions, and black pepper into a paste with ground mustard and sweet oil (or lemon juice) and brown sugar.

Stuff and cover

  1. When cold, stuff each mango, add the plug, sew it on with coarse thread, and wrap with string.

  2. Replace the plug and tie it in place with strips of cotton or twine.

  3. Cover the stuffed mangoes with cold vinegar.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Horseradish + turmerictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Mangoes
Form the vessel that is hollowed, stuffed, and softened by boiling.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp mustard, horseradish, and vinegar flavours.
Mustard seed
Contributes pungent heat and sharp flavour to the stuffing paste.
Horseradish
Adds pungent, sharp heat to the stuffing.
Sweet oil
Adds fat and moisture that helps bind the stuffing into a paste.
Onions
Add moisture and savoury bulk to the stuffing paste.

The step that matters

Boil the mangoes until tender enough to pierce with a straw. Boiling softens the fruit so it can be stuffed and sealed without tearing. Under-cooked mangoes stay firm and may split or resist the plug, while over-cooking makes them collapse.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, mustard, nutmeg, horseradish, turmeric, onion, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, mustard, nutmeg, horseradish, turmeric, onion, pepper. 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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