Mangoes Mangifera indica
Cut down either side of the flat stone, score the flesh in a grid, push the skin inside out.
In the kitchen
Under heat
Grilled or seared, the sugars at the surface caramelize before the flesh underneath softens — thirty seconds a side is usually enough.
Against air
Cut mango browns slower than apple or banana, so you have a reasonable window to plate it ahead of serving.
In storage
Ripen on the counter, then move to the fridge to hold — cold stops an unripe mango from ever softening properly.
At the shop
Smell the stem end. A ripe mango smells sweet there even through the skin; a green one smells like nothing.
Which variety, for what
- Ataulfo / Honey mango
- Small and fiberless with less acidity — the easier one to eat with a spoon.
- Tommy Atkins
- The common supermarket mango — larger, more fibrous, holds up better to cutting into cubes.
Beyond the kitchen
THE MOST EATEN FRUIT ON EARTH
By volume consumed, mango is among the most eaten fruits globally, and India alone grows around half the world crop — while exporting only a small fraction of it. Most of the world's mangoes are eaten within a few hundred miles of where they grew.
RELATED TO POISON IVY
Mango is in the Anacardiaceae, the same family as cashew, pistachio and poison ivy. The sap and skin contain urushiol, the compound behind poison ivy rashes, and people sensitive to it can react to handling mango skin. The flesh is unaffected.
MANGO DIPLOMACY
Mangoes have carried political weight in South Asia for centuries. Indian and Pakistani governments have both used gifts of prized varieties as diplomatic gestures, and in 1968 a crate of mangoes given to Mao became the object of a genuine and strange personal cult in China.
THE PAISLEY
The paisley motif derives from the Persian boteh, which is widely understood to be a stylised mango or cypress form, and mango leaves are strung across doorways at Hindu weddings and festivals as a symbol of prosperity.
A longer history
Mangifera indica was domesticated in South and Southeast Asia and has been cultivated in India for something in the order of four thousand years. It appears throughout Sanskrit literature, in Buddhist texts — the Buddha was said to have been given a mango grove — and in Mughal court records, where emperors maintained orchards and named varieties. Akbar is credited with planting an orchard of a hundred thousand trees.
Buddhist monks carried the fruit into Southeast Asia and China, and Persian and Arab traders took it west; the English word comes through Portuguese from the Tamil and Malayalam. Portuguese traders introduced grafting to Indian mango cultivation in the sixteenth century, which made the propagation of named varieties possible and transformed the crop.
It reached the Americas and Africa through European colonial networks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is now grown throughout the tropics. India remains overwhelmingly the largest producer, with hundreds of named varieties — Alphonso, Kesar, Langra, Dasheri — that are regional institutions in a way no Western fruit variety quite matches.