Pie, be it mango pie or any other kind of pie, is not a common or popular dessert in Bangladesh. Before today, pie to me was a dessert that has crust with criss-cross patterns and some delicious filling. Because this is what I’ve mostly seen in movies and that is almost all the association I have with pies. There are desserts with crispy crust on the outside and sweet-savory fillings on the inside, but none of them can be categorized as pies. 

Pie was first made and enjoyed by the Ancient Egyptian. Afterwards it made a journey westbound, rather than eastbound. Especially in the Indian subcontinent, pie never caught up with the plethora of sweets, pithas, cakes. 

Even in 2023 Dhaka, Bangladesh pie is still a niche dish. So it’s safe to say pie is all but nonexistent in the rest of the country. And honestly, seeing a recipe for a pie did take me by surprise a little. Because Moni Dadi wrote these recipes some 40 or 50 years ago, yet the dessert still has not become a thing. If you consider the socio-economic state of the country back then, the feat becomes even more remarkable. 

Mango-Pie ingredients

Now pie not being a makes sense, even judging by Mango Pie’s recipe. I don’t know about the actual history but just thinking about it, whipped cream, gelatine are not ingredients that the simple recipe following rural people of Bangla would be familiar with. A key aspect of Bengali cuisine is the naturalness of the ingredients. Spices, sweeteners like Gur (jaggery), and almost every other ingredient is somewhat found directly in nature, not industrially or chemically made. 

Nevertheless what I find curious is that pie still is not a thing in Dhaka. It is available in high end bakeries, pastry shops, and restaurants. But you won’t find it in any of the common bakery chains or restaurants. Almost every kind of food is being made and sold, you can even find street pizza and pasta in Dhaka. But no pie anywhere. So today’s recipe is the only opportunity I have gotten so far to try out pie. 

But now to the other name part of the dish, mango. The popularity of mango in Bangladesh is completely on the other side of the spectrum when compared to pie. People from my generation are not usually keen on fruits, I have never seen any of my friends mention that they are craving jackfruit or amla. But I don’t know a single person that does not like mango. 

Saying that Bangladeshi people “like” mango would be an understatement. To us eating mango is simply an irresistible experience. The ways of eating mangoes are plenty too, and calling some of them “devouring” rather than eating would be appropriate. But that’s just part of loving mango as a nation. 

Now of course mango has been used in Bangladeshi cuisine for a long time. Most of these recipes are simple and can be made at home with the simplest instruments. Mango juice, mango milkshake, mango, mango kheer, mango kulfi, mango sandesh, mango pudding are pretty common in every household in Bangladesh during mango season. There are different varieties of mango cultivated in Bangladesh and they have unique taste and qualities. All of them can be used to make the aforementioned dishes, but you won’t get the best tasting dish from just any mango. The better the original mango tastes, the better the dish would taste. So fazli, lengra, himsagar are some of the ideal varieties for making desserts and they are in general the more popular varieties. 

The dish itself, mango pie, tasted great. Though you can probably guess that I cannot compare the taste to any other pie. And just going by pictures of what I have seen, it does not look much like a typical pie either. But as a dessert, it did actually taste really good.