Now made with real fruit!

This recipe would not belong in a book of quick six-hour recipes if not for the fresh mangos, because cutting mangos is a disproportional work-to-reward task; you can’t make me believe their flavor is worth all the trouble. I’d rather cut up a pineapple than a mango, so, really, you make mango cucumber salad out of love, or when you want to impress someone else.

Ingredients

  • onion
  • cucumber
  • mango
  • Everglades seasoning
  • vinegar
  • olive oil

Method

Gather all the ingredients before you begin or you’ll have to leave the kitchen in the middle of making this dish, and this is supposed to be a quick, six-hour recipe, not a twelve-hour trip to the grocery store. It’s always best to start with the onion since it’s a walk in the park that warms you up to the treacherous mango. The consensus is that a red onion is the best choice for this dish, and if given that choice, I will choose a red onion because they have a sharper bite, but I have often used yellow and even white onions, so the type of onion does not make or break the mango cucumber salad.

After you dice the onions, set them aside and mentally prepare yourself to get the least amount of resolve out of the most amount of work when you cut the mango. The oblong pit inside forces you to cut off the sides of the mango lengthwise and avoiding this pit can be challenging. It’s hard to cut through the pit, so you end up overcompensating and missing several cubic inches of mango which makes the next part seem futile. Lay the cut sides concave and slice a grid pattern so that you’re creating protruding cubes; a trypophobia hellscape. I first noticed my discomfort around clusters of repetitive patterns in college where they provided sand-filled urns for students to extinguish cigarettes. The butts were always standing up like little skyscrapers pushed into the sand just far enough to deprive the cherry of oxygen. I wanted to knock them over sad badly, I craved it, and maybe this describes my shifting disposition on mangos. Use a spoon to scoop out the cubes of mango, just like an avocado, and put them into a mixing bowl with the diced onions.

I like unpeeled cucumbers but peeling the cucumbers for this dish will make it slightly more enjoyable according to my wife, but I literally just got up and went to the kitchen and sliced a cucumber to see how noticeable the peeling was. You’ll be fine either way. Just cut the damn cucumber lengthwise and then cut those pieces lengthwise so that you have quartered the cucumber lengthwise, then dice those pieces into bite-sized pieces and toss them into your mixing bowl along with the onions and mangos and mix it well as you coat it with olive oil.

The type of vinegar you choose is not too critical, I have used balsamic and apple vinegar with great results. Be as generous with it as your experience with vinegar instructs; certainly, add it only by the capful but don’t be afraid of it. When you get the proportion of oil and vinegar how you like it, then you’ll add the super special secret seasonings. I traveled east of here and north of the Blackwater River—which was south for me since we were living in Nashville at the time—to discover a blend of super special secret seasonings conceived down south yet ironically not in “The South” (since the truism says the farther south you go in Florida the more north you are), but in the southwest in its namesake, the Everglades.

As a weary traveler I found myself with familiar company for the night, and at the dinner table I was given a humble plate of seemingly ordinary vegetables that included, to my memory, broccoli, onions, zucchini, red bell pepper and yellow squash. I repeatedly remarked how wonderful the flavors were and must have gone on so fervently for the host to reveal from the kitchen a cylindrical tube of Everglades All-Purpose Seasoning. Usually, I’m not impressed with all-purpose seasonings but there is something indeterminably appealing in Everglades seasoning. The story goes that Mess Sergeant Bill Gerstman perfected it in 1976 thirty-two years after he created it. The only uncommon ingredient on the label is “papain” so I assume it provides the unique flavor. As it turns out, I didn’t need to travel the southeast region of the United States to find this seasoning because when we returned to Nashville, I found it at the grocery store only a few blocks from our home.

I still believe I came up with this recipe because I had never heard of mixing mango and cucumbers; surprising, I know, for a boy who grew up quicheless. Now, it’s all over the internet and my wife claims she told me about it. Nevertheless, one night in a village north of Nashville I introduced the dish to the Everglades seasoning.

I sprinkle on as much Everglades as I shake out of the container, usually until I feel Bill tap me on the shoulder, then I mix it around with a spoon and eat a few bites before leaving it in the fridge for my wife to finish off by tomorrow.