Accept Mango Pie: the Ice Cream!
Today, the great ice cream company Salt & Straw – who are famous for their innovative, interesting ice cream flavors – unveiled a new, limited-edition flavor for Thanksgiving: Mom’s Mango Pie. It’s incredibly delicious, and incredibly exciting, because that’s my mom they’re talking about! And her mango pie recipe!
Mango pie is something my mom would make every year for my family’s Thanksgiving meal, starting sometime in the late 1980s, and forgive me, but I’ve basically been talking about it ever since.
For most of my life, each year, about a month before Thanksgiving, the anticipation and chatter about mango pie would begin among our family friends, the ones who came over each year to celebrate with us. Forget turkey, forget cornbread – in our house, mango pie was the star of the show, and we’d all count down the days until we could eat it.
In 2019, a year before chef and author Samin Nosrat and I started our podcast Home Cooking together, the first sort of public collaboration we had was when she wrote about my mom’s mango pie recipe for her column in The New York Times Magazine. She wrote about the cultural mashup the dish represents, with one foot in the Indian grocery store (where you go to get the canned Alphonso mango pulp) and one foot in an American grocery store (to pick up Cool Whip, Philadelphia cream cheese, and a Keebler graham cracker crust). That story, and Samin’s gourmet adaptation of the recipe, came out, and suddenly, the conversation around the mango pie extended so much further than the reaches of my childhood home. People started making mango pies and posting them on Instagram, and I’m not sure they knew how much it thrilled me to see.
My mom passed away in 2020. In a cruel bit of timing, it was the week before Thanksgiving. The special Thanksgiving Home Cooking podcast episode we had recorded the week prior to that had featured a conversation about my mom's mango pie and how it figured into the creation of the podcast itself. I went back east for the funeral and stayed another week. Thanksgiving didn’t feel like Thanksgiving that year. There was no mango pie, and everything felt quiet.
But last year, we hosted Thanksgiving at my house, here in Los Angeles, and I made mango pie again. Now, it’s not just a symbol of the Indian diaspora, it’s also a symbol of my mom, and her memory, and her impact on my life and the people she loved. And what better vessel for all of that than the bright, light sweetness of that dish. So how could I stop talking about mango pie? It’s a way to share a bit of who she was with people.
Last year, when I made the pie, it didn’t turn out so well. I tried to make a vegan version of it, experimenting with the recipe, and it didn’t set. Instead of a beautiful, creamy custard, it was more like….melted ice cream. I had to serve it in bowls instead of on a plate. But out of that pie failure, an idea was born.
I reached out to the Kim & Tyler Malek, the wonderful and warm co-founders of Salt & Straw, whom I’d gotten to know when I interviewed them for an episode of the Partners podcast, with a daydream. This was the day after Thanksgiving 2021. They were just as excited about the idea of creating an ice cream together out of this recipe. And now, a year later, after several batches and delicious rounds of taste-testing, it’s finally here: Mom’s Mango Pie, the Thanksgiving ice cream flavor.
There are Salt & Straw locations in Oregon, California, Washington, and Florida, where it'll be available in the stores until Thanksgiving. And you can order pints of the ice cream to be shipped anywhere in the US, and you can order through the end of the year. So it can be a part of whatever kind of holiday tradition you might have in the coming months.
I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do with grief. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, but I guess my response to it has been to try to make things that let me feel some continued connection with my mom. I made music about her. And I keep talking about her. A couple weeks ago, I got to be a guest on the podcast Death, Sex & Money, hosted by one of the best interviewers out there, Anna Sale, who talked me about my mother's life, and her death, and my memories of both. I hope you’ll listen.
Here's to the sweet things that connect us to the people we love.
— Hrishikesh