In Miami I ordered a “mango salad” and got no lettuce and nothing sweet. Just strips of mango with salt, lime and chili.
It’s a Central American street snack, mostly from Honduras and El Salvador, that travelled to Miami with those communities. It came with a baleada, and a few days later I had it again next to pupusas.
The classic uses green mango (mango tierno): unripe, hard, crunchy and sour instead of sweet. It gets cut up and seasoned with salt, lime juice and chili. In Honduras and El Salvador it often gets alguashte too: toasted pumpkin seeds ground with salt, earthy and nutty. The word is Nahuatl, from ayotli (squash) and huactli (seed). Mexico has its own version, with chile and chamoy at the fruit stands.
Why does salt on fruit work? A little salt dampens bitterness, so the sweet and the sour stand out more. There might also be a specific sugar-plus-salt pathway on the tongue, but I couldn’t check the study, so take that one as a maybe.
Salty mango. I’m converted.