Originally published at: Some folks call green peppers "mangoes" for a centuries-old reason - Boing Boing
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That sounds good, but it doesn’t sound very much like a mango.
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I’m confused, again.
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I’m confused about what she’s offering here:
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I wonder if this is what was meant in the children’s tongue twister about Peter Piper and his peck of pickled peppers, which I’ve never heard anything about outside of that rhyme.
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Haven’t you had those pickled Italian peppers (small, about the size of your thumb) that are often in salads?
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You mean pepperoni, which is what Italians call those piquant pickled peppers. For some reason we Americans call a sausage that instead, which is about as weird as calling a pepper a mango, I guess.
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You’re thinking of pepperoncini. Pepperoncino, in Italy, is a completely different kind of pepper.
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I’ve always heard “mangoes” pronounced “main-goes.” What are the alternatives? “Man (rhymes with ban)-goes?” “Mahn-goes?” Is “main-goes” a US thing?
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Ah, that’s right, pepperoni is more properly sweet peppers in Italy rather than hot.
Mang (rhymes with tang) - goes
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I think I might adopt this in my life, just to confuse people. “Excuse me, Mr grocer sir. Where are your mangos? No, not those. I’m taking about mangos. makes vague outline of bell pepper with both hands”
Maybe bananas can be called carrots and walnuts will now be brussel sprouts.
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Some folks call green peppers “Paprika”.
[shrugs and shuffles over to the fridge]
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Thank you for this explanation! Pizza places in the small town I grew up in in semi-rural Ohio always called green peppers “mangoes” on their menus, so I always thought of it as a weird alternate name for the things, but never knew why. It’s still a bizarre reason, but at least there’s a reason.
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Yup. As a kid growing up in the 60’s in Indiana, all the supermarkets labeled green bell peppers as mangoes. You have to remember that, at least where I grew up, scant few people had ever encountered an actual mango. Plus, this was a time when green bell peppers were pretty much the only bell peppers in the stores. Red bell peppers had yet to appear (at least in the markets we frequented.)
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Do you eat your Swedes raw?
https://gardendrum.com/2013/07/27/how-to-grow-swedes-or-rutabaga/
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No,m “pepperoncini”; “pepperoni” is a sausage.
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Again, no, it’s “pepperoncini”.
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Not what I’ve been told by an Italian, and Wikipedia (“The term “pepperoni” is a borrowing of peperoni, the plural of peperone, the Italian word for bell pepper…”) but it’s not a hill I’m prepared to die on, lol.
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I always call those “oranges.”
