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Dessert

Peach Mangoes

A pickled preserve of peaches flavored with mustard seed, celery seed, horseradish, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Peach Mangoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. Cut peaches in halves and remove the stones.

  2. Fill each half with sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, and horseradish.

  3. Bind the peaches together with white string.

Make the syrup and pickle

  1. In a pot, combine vinegar and sugar, then bring to a boil.

  2. Pour the boiling mixture over the peaches in a jar.

  3. Drain the syrup and boil it for 15 minutes each morning until thick.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Celery + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together835 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit that softens and absorbs the sweet-sour pickling flavor.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the peaches and gives the pickle its sharp taste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as the syrup reduces, thickens the pickling liquid.
White mustard seed
Contributes a sharp, pungent flavor to the peach filling.

The step that matters

Drain the syrup and boil it each morning until thick. Reboiling the syrup over several days concentrates the sugar and vinegar, so it thickens and keeps the peaches preserved. Boiling too briefly or skipping days leaves it thin and less stable.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, mustard, celery, horseradish, 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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