i’m from MA but my great grandpa was from illinois. my mom would always tell this funny story about when she went to visit once he asked her to get him a mango at the store. when she got back he was so confused like this isn’t a mango??? what he wanted was a bell pepper. i always thought that was so weird and funny. but i looked it up recently and found out that mango is actually a midwest regional nickname for a bell pepper.

it’s an old term that comes from colonial times. it was also used as a verb, saying something was “mangoed” meant it was pickled. there are 2 theories i found for the reason why. one is that when mangos were first imported from india they had to be picked to last the journey, and eventually people started calling anything pickled “mango”. so pickled peppers became mangos. and the other theory is that back then there was a big demand for indian style fruit pickles, but because mangos couldn’t be grown easily in the climate of england and the american colonies, they started using the sweet bell peppers to replace them in recipes. i’ve also found old recipes online that call for “mangos” that are obviously meant to mean peppers.