By Joel Denker

We have fallen in love with the latest mango fashions—smoothies, salsas, sorbets. We scorn the sour green mango that South Asians love. And, just like tomatoes, we want mangoes that are tasty and ripe all the time.

In the mango’s heartland, on the Indian Subcontinent, the fruit is a seasonal pleasure. Planting the tree, picking the fruit, reveling in its honeyed flavor, and preserving its riches are all part of the rhythms of the culture. You can transplant the mango but not the social fabric into which it is woven.

A recent visit to the Burma Restaurant, the city’s only eatery featuring that country’s cuisine, stimulated these thoughts. The hilly region between Northeast India and Burma is widely considered to be the birthplace of the mango.

One afternoon I enjoyed a classic Burmese dish, mango pork, while Jane Tin-pe and her son, John, who run the business, explained their people’s affection for the sour mango. Pieces of mango pickle imbued the gravy suffusing the tender chunks of pork with its sharp flavor. The mango, John remarked, had been marinated in a mixture of oil, chili pepper, and garlic. The mango’s role, he said, was “to cut the fattiness of the pork, which was a little too rich.”

The sourness of the unripe mango is what endears the fruit to the Burmese. “Burmese want sour and spicy,” Jane commented. “Everything is sour in Burma.” The climate is also conducive to this pleasure.”When it’s hot, we just want to eat sour things.”

Although the Burmese eat the sweet mango, they prefer the tart one. They dip slices of green mango in fish sauce. A stick of “barely ripe mango,” seasoned with salt and hot pepper, John said, is a popular street market treat.

The Burma encourages customers with a liking for sweet mangoes and fruity chutney to explore strange tastes. “Westerners have a sweet tooth,” John observed.

I was eager to learn more of the story behind the golden fruit. The mango, I discovered, is a lofty evergreen whose long stems offer up clusters of opulent fruit. A source of pleasure as well as an object of devotion, it was mentioned in Indian writings as early as 2000 B.C. His followers presented the Buddha with a mango grove, whose lush foliage provided a canopy under which he could meditate and rest. Mango trees became a fixture of the gardens of Buddhist temples.

The tree symbolized fertility and plenty, love and fulfillment, to the Hindus. Its pinkish blossoms, which fall off as the fruit emerges, represented the arrows of the Indian Cupid. Families, desiring a son, adorned their doorways with its leaves.

The “pride of the garden,” as poet Amir Khusrau calls it, is honored in religious rites. Early Spring flowers were offered to Sarasvati, God of Wisdom. On Hindu holy days, believers brushed their teeth with its twigs.

The fruit was the stuff of myth and fable. In one legend, recounted by food writer Jane Grigson, the daughter of the sun “jumped into a lake and became a golden lotus” in order to “escape from a wicked sorceress who was after her..The king of the land fell in love with the golden lotus. The sorceress burnt it to ashes. From the ashes grew a tree, the tree flowered and the king fell in love with this second flower. The flower became a fruit, a glorious mango, and the king fell in love with the mango. When the mango was ripe, it fell to the ground and split. Out stepped the daughter of the sun in her beauty, and the king recognized her as his wife whom he had lost long ago.”

The tree, which exerted such power over the imagination, was a strong and hardy one. Now domesticated, it grew wild in the high forests, rooting deeply in hillsides, ravines, and streams. The mango which can live up to a hundred years, thrives in the unforgiving terrain. But it will only flourish in areas with a definite short, dry season followed by a long rainy period. The monsoon months in India, Pakistan, and Burma — from April to the middle or end of June—are the peak time for ripening. The voluptuous “apples of the tropics” are then ready to be plucked.

The fruits—their size, shape, and color, are tremendously varied. They can be yellow, pink, red, or purple. They can be tiny or plump, round, oval, long, or narrow. So irresistible was its shape that the mango became a common motif on saris and shawls. Europeans borrowed the pattern in their paisley designs.

The Indians were so keen on the fruit that they domesticated more than a thousand kinds from seedlings. One of the most ancient of cultivated fruits was made more desirable and delicious through the patient, devoted efforts of unsung farmers. Unpleasant qualities—too much fiber, a turpentiny taste—of a fruit whose relatives include poison ivy and poison oak were replaced with more attractive characteristics. Cultivators selected for fruit with the sweetest, juiciest flavor and concentrated on growing these types.

So essential was the mango to the Indian diet that its oldest name, amra, the botanist Martson Bates, points out, was also the Sanskrit word for provisions or victuals. The Hindu shortened it to am. The fruit also acquired different names in the country’s regional languages: The Tamils in the South called it mankay.

The mango moved further East, most likely with Buddhist monks who brought their religion and tastes with them during the fourth or fifth centuries B.C. Transplanted to what is now Malaysia and Indonesia, the fruit acquired a new name, mangas.

Enamored of the luscious fruit they found growing in Goa, the capital of their trading empire, the Portuguese in the sixteenth century carried it to their other Indian outposts. They also grafted new delectable varieties of mangoes and gave them Portuguese names—Carreira, Parreira, Fernardin. As I talked with Manuel Periera, the Goan counterman at the Adams-Morgan cafe Jolt ‘N Bolt, he spoke lyrically about the Alphonso, his favorite variety. Named for a Governor-General, the Alphonso changes from yellowish green to vivid yellow to scarlet.

The Portuguese, the tireless disseminators of the pineapple, the cashew, and other plants, found new homes for the mango. They took its seeds, historian A.J.R. Russell-Wood notes, to their stations along the East African coast, which guarded the route to India. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the mariners had introduced the plant in their Brazilian colony.

The mango circulated through the Americas. From Rio de Janeiro it traveled to the Barbados in 1742. The British seized a cargo of mangoes from a French ship headed for Haiti and planted their bounty in Jamaica in 1782. India sent one of its prized varieties, the “mulgoba” (“makes the mouth water”), to the U.S. in 1889, where it ended up in the hands of a horticulturist in Lake Worth, Florida.

Back at Jolt ‘N Bolt, I picked up more mango lore from the South Asian staff, who grew up with tropical fruit. Farooq Munir, whose shop turns out one of the widest assortments of fruit smoothies (mango, guava, pineapple, banana), is nostalgic for the mangoes of his native Pakistan. He remembers picnics and parties where the fruit took center stage. “We all sit down and eat this together as a family, as a reunion. It’s part of our culture.”

A “hot” fruit, the mango, Farooq says, warms the body during cool weather. As we talked, a customer from Bombay added his observations: “The mango, it’s an aphrodisiac.”

The mango, Farooq laments, has fallen prey to the unrelenting desire for immediate gratification in his adopted land. Too impatient to wait for the fruit to naturally ripen, we too easily accept “force ripened” mangoes.

Counterman Pereira associates seasons of the year in Goa with mango rituals. During harvest time, workers pulled mangoes from the trees with a fascinating contraption, a “stick with a net.” When small, green sour mangoes appeared on the trees, families turned their minds to making pickle, a tart relish that marries the acidity of the fruit with a pungent masala, a spice mix. “Every time the season starts, people prepared mango pickle,” he recalls.

I went searching for mango chutney at Whole Foods and was jolted back to reality. A salesclerk took me to the shelves of Indian condiments. A cracker spread with Major Grey chutney, a sweet confection conjured up by the British in India, topped with cream cheese, and onion, she told me, was one of her fondest memories of growing up. I wondered how she would handle the mango pork at the Burma.

 

Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/