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Oil Mangoes

A preserved mango dish flavored with mustard seed, horseradish, garlic, peppers, ginger, allspice, mace, celery seed, and olive oil.

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

Prepare the mangoes

  1. Cut the mangoes open and remove the seeds.

  2. Fill the mangoes with coarse sea salt and let them sit for 24 hours.

  3. Rinse the salt out of the mangoes and fill them with the mixture.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix the mustard seed, horseradish, garlic, green peppers, ginger, allspice, mace, celery seed, and olive oil until well combined.

Pack and cover

  1. Sew the mangoes closed and place them in jars.

  2. If any filling remains, add it to the jars with the mangoes.

  3. Cover the filled jars with boiling 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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tender melons
Serve as the vessel that is filled, salted, and preserved in the jars.
White mustard seed
Adds sharp pungency that flavors the filling and the preserved melon.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during preserving.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savory depth to the filling.
Pure olive oil
Carries the spices and coats the filling, adding fat and mouthfeel.
Boiling vinegar
Acidifies the jars and helps preserve the melons and filling.

The step that matters

Rinse the salt out of the mangoes. Salt draws water out of the melon and softens it. If the salt is not rinsed off well, the finished pickles will taste overly salty. Rinsing removes surface salt before the filling goes in.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against melon, mustard, horseradish, garlic, pepper, ginger, allspice. 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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