The Sunday Telegraph - Sunday

Why happy memories are made with mangoes

Romy Gill celebrates the sunshine fruit that brings back the taste of her childhood in India

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The smell, the taste – even the sight – of mangoes evoke so many memories of my childhood and the excitement of sharing their sticky sweetness with my siblings. When they were in season, I could easily eat three or four of these delicious fruits in a single day – after my dad had filled a bucket with cold water and dropped the mangoes in to chill first.

As kids growing up in Burnpur in West Bengal, we found that the best way to eat them was to suck the juice from the fruit – and it’s an opinion I still hold now. Whenever I do this, I’m reminded of when I was four- or five-years-old, when my mother demanded that I took off my top before eating them to save her from having to do yet another load of washing!

Our summer holidays always featured a 24-hour train journey from West Bengal to Punjab, and mangoes were a big part of those travels. My mother always used to pack a beautiful picnic, choosing food that wouldn’t go stale and serving it up with mango pickle and chutney. When the train stopped at the designated platforms, she would buy fresh mangoes from the street vendors, bartering hard to get the best possible price. That would be our dessert for the journey ahead: eaten while taking it in turns to press our noses against the glass from the window seat, watching and waving at the people who we passed working in the fields.

In the heat of the summer, the shade of the mango orchards was a real blessing as the train passed through them. I’d sit and daydream, wondering which houses the fruits would be going to, and imagining the people who would be enjoying them. With no gadgets – just ludo, cards and each other – those train journeys were blissful, and a great way to meet new friends. My sister and brotherin-law met on one such journey, sharing delicious mangoes and getting married years later.

It’s not just ripe mangoes that evoke these memories, though. My parents would sometimes carefully choose the unripe fruits, dicing them into small chunks before adding salt and turmeric and putting them into a clean muslin cloth to dry out before adding various spices to make achaar. Here in Britain, where I have lived for almost 30 years, I make it very differentl­y as we have nowhere near as much sun, but my teenage daughters love the version made by my parents. My dad called me recently to tell me that he has put aside some homemade achaar for the girls when we are finally able to visit.

A few years back, I travelled to India in search of mangoes for a newspaper feature, visiting four different states: a trip that proved to be a real eyeopener. I discovered so many varieties of the fruit – we may all be familiar with the Alphonso, with its sunshineye­llow skin, but there are so many more besides.

Alphonsos are the first to start cropping in India and the first to arrive in the UK, usually from May, in Asian shops; you’ll find mangoes from all over the world – from Peru, Brazil, West Africa, Israel and many more – in supermarke­ts, and often all year round, too. These may well be a bit hard when you buy them; keep them near a bunch of bananas and they will ripen well.

My love of mangoes definitely stems from my mum: a woman who would proudly teach other women in the community to make her beloved pickle. She made a huge number of different recipes with different mango varieties, knowing exactly which type would work for which dish. It would have been sacrilege, in her eyes, to make a mango shake with anything other than totapuri mangoes – or to make aam panna (a cooling summer drink, which she made for us as a remedy for dehydratio­n and heatstroke) with the wrong type.

It’s thanks to her that I use mangoes so frequently in my food: both sweet and savoury dishes, as these four recipes show.

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Romy Gill was inspired by the wide variety of mangoes on a fruit-finding tour of India
BOWLED OVER Romy Gill was inspired by the wide variety of mangoes on a fruit-finding tour of India

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