Where Bell Peppers are Mangos

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Rosemary from Evansville, Indiana.

Hey, Rosemary, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question about an expression that my southern Indiana mother-in-law used. Talking to other folks from the same town, they remember their parents using this expression. I actually grew up out east, but relocated to southern Indiana and married a fellow who was raised up here in a small town.

The first time his mother was talking to me about making her family’s favorite chili sauce, she asked me to bring in some tomatoes and mangoes from my garden. And I was kind of confused because you don’t grow mangoes in southern Indiana.

No, you don’t.

Yeah, not typically. And I thought that would make a rather interesting chili sauce. Mangoes, what are you talking about? And she said, you know, mangoes, mangoes. And I said, well, I don’t have mangoes in my garden. She said, yes, you do. Peppers. Green peppers. And I was like, oh, I never heard a green pepper called a mango. And I’ve never been anywhere else where people have heard it. But people here, the older generation, and I mean older because I’m no spring chicken, they refer to green peppers as mangoes.

Is it only the older generation, or is it being passed on to the kids and grandkids at this point? It seems to me like it’s mostly the older generation. Because when I’ve talked to my husband’s cousins and stuff, who also grew up up there, we all had the same thing. It was kind of like, yeah, we don’t know where they got this from. And it’s not like it says mangoes on the shelf in the grocery store. It says green peppers. It’s kind of a really odd phenomenon. And we were just curious about if you guys had any idea where that came from.

We sure do. We do. As a matter of fact, it is a story of 400 years of British history in India. So pull up a chair. I’ll make it brief. But when the British first went to India, they encountered a wide variety of edible things that they could not bring home because there was no refrigeration. So the way that they brought them home, they would pickle them or spice them up according to the local traditions. And in that way, you could have a little sample of what it was like to eat food in India.

However, one of those fruits was the mango. And there was a particular way, kind of like making a chutney, that you would prepare a mango. And this is how most British people encountered mangoes for a very long time as a kind of sauce, almost like a relish of a sort. That particular name, mango, began to be applied to the pickling technique itself or to the preparing technique. It’s a preservation method, a preserving method. And so you can find a wide variety of recipes over the centuries where people talk about mangoing different kinds of fruit and vegetables. Like you might mango a melon or you might mango a cucumber, that sort of thing.

But then it transformed one more time. And the pickling technique name, which came from the fruit name, then was reapplied to a couple of different vegetables, including green bell peppers, and it took the noun form of the verb, which had been verbed from a noun before.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, and we can trace this through cookbooks and journals and letter articles. It’s a wide variety of written stuff where we can find copious evidence of this transformation of the word mango until it arrived in the New World, and for some reason, that particular noun mango, referring to green bell peppers, which for a long time were preserved using the mango pickling technique. It stuck in the Ohio River Valley, including Indiana and neighboring states. And that’s where we are.

That’s where you are.

Yeah. And so it’s an incredible story. Like the deep history that goes into this one, this single dialect feature has always amazed me.

That is really amazing.

Absolutely fascinating. I’m so glad I called you guys and asked.

Oh, yeah.

We are, too. I mean, I could write a book on this one word, and I would love to do it, but nobody would read it except for me, and maybe that would be enough. I don’t know. But I wanted, Rosemary, I wanted to say you said something about it not getting, it’s not named mango in the store. We have talked about this at least once before on the show, and we got a message from a guy who works in the grocery business. And he told us that in order to make sure there’s no confusion in his business, they do label mango fruit and mango peppers on the boxes to make sure that people understand what they’re getting in that part of the country.

Oh, isn’t that funny?

Yeah. So, Rosemary, you’ve just confirmed what we talk about all the time on the show, which is that there’s a world inside of every word. And what a great history encapsulated in the word that you brought to us. Mango, meaning green peppers, has got the whole tale behind it.

Well, that is just amazing, and I am so glad I called you guys and that you shared that with me, and I hope there’s other people that will smile like I am and say, oh, I’m so glad to know that.

Yay!

Thank you very much. It was delightful to talk with you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Rosemary.

Bye-bye.

Like we say on the show all the time, the intersection of food and language is wonderful. If you’ve got a food language question, give us a call, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.