Dr. Strangelove

…or How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love the Mango

The first time I bit into a mango, I hated it. If you’re a mango lover, I know what you might be thinking, and yes, I did peel it first. That wasn’t the problem. Immediately after biting into it I was overwhelmed with this mushy taste of sweetened hairspray. Having on at least one occasion in memory sprayed my mother’s hairspray in my mouth, I took mangoes to be a bad thing filled with a vile substance akin to eating grooming products. I then shelved the idea of eating mangoes entirely as my palette became more refined and I established (and verified with a Wikipedia search on “mango”) that they actually taste of varying degrees of turpentine.

Once my attention had been drawn to mangoes, much like anything I hate, I became acutely aware of how much they were loved. If I had a nickel for every time someone said, “How can you not like mangoes?” to me, I could have afforded enough turpentine to burn down the world’s mango orchards. Everywhere I looked, people were enjoying mangoes. I traveled to Mexico, where I ran into a man with baskets full of mangoes. He stopped me and said, “What is this in your country?” “Mango,” I replied bitterly. “It mango here, too!” he said, smiling and going off to his business. There seemed to be a universal love of mangoes, but much like a seemingly universal love of American Idol, I was convinced that the world simply loved to torture themselves.

My first success at overcoming my hatred was when I fell in love. Shannon too enjoyed mangoes and I set out to discover a dish involving mangoes that I would actually want to eat. I succeeded in doing so with a chutney, which successfully blasted out the turpentine tang with the sweetness of brown sugar and spiciness of chili peppers. Sure, completely masking the flavor of something you hate with more powerful ingredients is a pretty small step towards actually liking something, but it was a start.

It wasn’t until recently, when we moved to Montreal, that I actually acquired a taste for the fruit itself. It certainly helped that mangoes here are around fifty cents on a good day, versus the two dollars in not-so tropical and relatively isolated Alberta, affording me more opportunities to waste mangoes I still hadn’t decided to like yet. The mangoes here are plentiful, delivered presumably straight from the Yucatan peninsula. Their skins are smooth, their flesh has but a slight give, they smell good. In short, they’re fresher, better quality mangoes than the chemically flavored imposter I was trying to grow to love back west. Surely this isn’t the first time that globalization had given someone a tainted first impression of this fruit.

That’s not to say the first mango I had here had separated all my past impressions and started a new love affair with mangoes. They still tasted like turpentine to me, but with sweeter, juicier flesh. I grew to like it sort of like I enjoy the smell of gasoline, before I grew to like it like I enjoy an orange. But now, when I walk down the street and see tourists eating three dollar mango fans on a stick, I refuse this pleasure only because I know I can buy a half dozen mangoes at the market for the same price; because I’d rather have a half dozen mangoes than have to stop at one.

Sweet Mango Chutney

• 2 tablespoons butter or ghee
• 1 small onion, minced
• 1 inch piece of ginger (about 2 teaspoons), peeled and grated
• 2 unripe mangoes, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon tamarind paste
• 1 teaspoon garam masala powder
• salt and pepper

Heat the ghee in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and ginger and cook for 1 minute. Add the mango, raisins, sugar, tamarind paste, and curry powder. Season with salt and pepper, reduce the heat to low, and cook until everything is soft and the flavors have blended, about 30 minutes. Put the chutney into a bowl and allow it to cool before serving.