How To Eat a Juicy Mango

Summer is here and so is my first mango of the season!  Let me teach you How To Eat a Juicy Mango with your bare hands. Mango is the king or I would say emperor of fruits and it brings a wave of nostalgia. My mom used to offer the first mango to God and only then bite into one. That’s how these luscious mangoes are revered. The mango I am eating is known as Chinna Rasalu or Small and Juicy. I feel I am blessed to have been born here in this land of this blessed fruit. This is the most popular juicy mango from the Andhra Pradesh region of India. It is extremely sweet and ambrosial to taste!

Most people extract the juice and eat it with a spoon but that’s no fun, just squeeze and sinks in your teeth and suck the juice straight from the mango to attain Mango bliss! As you can see the fibres are long and as kids, we would playfully call them moustaches and make them stick on our faces. I would love to watch my dad eating a mango as he was super fast and super funny. I used to eat it slowly, savouring every juicy mouthful and take time to finish one but my dad would finish one mango before you finished saying “Jack Robinson”!! Mind you eating a juicy mango neatly and without wasting any juice is a cultivated art. A first timer would be very clumsy but I am a pro at it!

How To Eat a Juicy Mango?

• You will not need any knife or chopping board or spoon, you just need a small plate and your hands.
• Wash the mango gently squeeze it around so that the pulp gets softened and is juicier.
• Remove the end of the stalk and press the mango from below and start sucking in the juice that comes up.
• Keep doing this until the seed loosens and the fibre comes up.
• Remove the seed and suck at the fibres till the juice is dry.
• Once the seed is without any juice, leave it on the plate and pick up the mango peel which still has some pulp in it.
• Squeeze the peel gently and suck up all the juice.
• Your mango eating is over and I am sure you will be asking for more 🙂

Now we count our calories and eat one mango and stop but as kids, we never counted the number. In those days there used to be no fridge to cool the mangoes and mom used to put dozens of mangoes in a bucket of water to which a block of ice was added. The ice used to be bought from the ice factory.

We were made to undress to the bare minimum as we would mess up our clothes nut none of us protested as mangoes were too delicious to resist and the season lasted only two months in a year.

Due to the hot weather and the mangoes adding to the heat we used to break out in skin eruptions. My mom’s homemade cure was fresh neem leaves from the tree in the garden made into a paste and rolled into balls were popped into our mouths every morning. We had no choice as it was the bitter neem pill versus the sweet, juicy mangoes. Man, were they bitter but then the lure of the mangoes was too strong.

I am looking forward to summer and more of mangoes to make juice, mango tarts, mango pudding, aam panna, mango chutney, mango lassi, mango dal and I am going to try out some mango noodles. Watch this space, folks!