I Am Mangoes

One summer day in the early 2000s, Pennsylvania dentist Bhaskar Savani sat outside the arrivals gate at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport waiting for his father to emerge. Three hours after his dad’s flight from India had landed, the senior Savani finally materialized, his fingers smelling of, well, me. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials had barred him from carrying his haul of mangoes into this country, and rather than tossing them into the trash as instructed, he ate several pounds of them right there in customs.

The younger Savani, whose father and grandfather were mango growers in Gujarat, India, wasn’t surprised at his dad’s refusal to let those mangoes go to waste. He was smuggling in the family’s Alphonsos—the most prized of 500-plus varieties of me—precisely because they were not allowed in the United States. Alphonsos are so much sweeter, juicier, and more layered and floral in flavor than those you can find in supermarkets here. Indeed, the family has spent the two decades since trying to bring it and other outrageously delicious Indian mangoes into your homes.

Despite India’s being the world’s biggest and best producer of me, the mangoes you find stateside are almost always grown in your hemisphere. Most familiar is the Tommy Atkins, that Nerf football-sized dark red one with the splash of green and yellow.

It comes from the Mulgoba, one of six types of mango tree that an American professor in Pune, India, sent to the States in 1889—and the only one that survived the Florida climate. But give a Tommy Atkins to a mango connoisseur and you’ll get laughed out of the fruit-of-the-month club. Much more worthy of your supermarket purchase is the bright yellow Ataulfo, or Champagne mango, grown in South America. Especially during its peak season of March through July, I advise you to snap some up, wait for them to ripen so that the skin wrinkles slightly, and enjoy a truly drippy, redolent treat.

Luckily, the Champagne also requires less labor from you; it’s less fibrous to cut, with a thinner pit to work around. No matter the variety, to get at my flesh, poke with your knife to identify the orientation of my oblong seed, then slice lobes off both of its flat sides. Score the flesh into half-inch cubes, then slice the cubes off the skin. I suggest buying extra of me—not selfishly, but to make up for my high seed-to-flesh ratio.

Ignore my color when you’re looking for signs of ripeness. I usually taste best when I’m soft to the touch, like a very ripe avocado. A ¾-cup serving of me will give you half your daily vitamin C and 15 percent of your daily folate and copper needs, and I may be your tastiest route to fiber.

Think of me as more than just fruit salad filler and roughage, however. I sweeten sticky rice in Thai desserts, get

tossed into Jamaican mango chutney, and—drizzled with fresh-squeezed lime juice and sprinkled with chile powder and salt—make for a popular Mexican street snack. I am tasty even when unripe, dipped in a Salvadoran condiment called alguashte made from ground pumpkin seeds.

Over the centuries in India, I have become a national emblem, triggering

“mango orgies” (eating frenzies at the start of my season) and even inspiring the country’s paisley pattern whose shapes, if you look twice, resemble mine. Hence the Savanis’ quixotic mission to spread the magic. In 2006, after the junior Savani had worked for years to convince the United States to let the Alphonso in, George W. Bush sampled one and called it “a hell of a fruit.” The U.S. and Indian governments struck a deal permitting Indian mangoes to enter the States. In return, India allowed in Harley-davidson motorcycles, previously banned on account of their high carbon emissions.

Savani imported the first load of Alphonsos in April 2007. Those boxes sold out immediately, and everyone thought it was only a matter of time before they took over the U.S. market. But the cost of shipping combined with various USDA importation hurdles put the price too high—up to $40 for a dozen. Aside from the canned pulp available online (see recipe at left), the Alphonso left America.

Yet Bhaskar Savani is his father’s son. He now sells another delicious Indian mango, the Kesar, via Freshdirect, and vows that it’s only a matter of time before the king of my species sits by its humbler cousins in your supermarkets.