Mangoes

It's mango season!  I realized this when a crate of Alphonso mangoes arrived at our door.  I grew up with my mom's complaints that American mangoes could never measure up to the ones of her childhood, and so wedged myself beside my cousin and gleefully picked through the filmy packing material to the fist-sized fruits inside.

We smelled the mangoes to see if they were ripe.  I didn't know how to do this, so I just took a whiff and put them aside.  Then we felt the mangoes to see if they were firm.  I didn't know you had to do this at all, with the sad result that all my chosen mangoes were rejected and dispatched back to the crate to ripen further.

But the mangoes that emerged!  Big Bazaar, the supermarket, has big signs in its fruit aisle advertising mango season.  Newspapers suggest tossing chunks of mango into pasta, chutney, curry and ice cream.  At the fruit stands outside the railway station, every other vendor has a dish of mangoes piled up next to apples and watermelon.

Thus far I've eaten mangoes in ice cream, juice and (my favorite!) plain.  Apparently they're a high calorie fruit, but the sweet, creamy taste more than makes up for it.  Here, unlike back home, people still buy fruit "with the season" - meaning, when it comes in from the fields.  I'm not used to this.  How many Americans are?  (The exercise - pick the four most common US fruits and identify - without help! - what months they grow.)